I am not perfect.
I am not perfect. I never have been. And yet, for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be. I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life auditioning for perfection. The right body. The right posture. The kind of skin that looks like it has never met a hard day. And hair that behaves. I have always longed for a version of me that, when she walks into a room, requires no apology, no explanation, and no asterisk.
I have wanted to be that. I have wanted perfection.
The trouble is that version of perfection was never really mine. She was never really me. She was assembled slowly, from every image I was fed growing up. Every magazine cover. Every music video. Every carefully lit face on a screen telling me, without ever saying it directly, this is what you are supposed to look like. This is what you are supposed to be. And I absorbed it like a sponge. Without question. Without resistance. As fact. We like to say there is beauty in our differences, and there is. But our lives are, in many ways, reflections of what we consume. The media we take in does not just entertain us, it instructs us. It tells us what is desirable, what is acceptable, and what is worthy of admiration. It sketches an outline of perfection and then leaves us to colour ourselves into it.
Perfection, I have since learned, is a mirage. You see it shimmering in the distance, and you walk toward it because what else are you going to do? So you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and just when your feet are aching, and you think you are finally close, it moves. Perfection is always a little further. A little more. A little beyond whatever you have just managed to become. Always a little out of reach. Perfection is not meant to be reached. That is the design. It is a destination that keeps relocating, so you never stop consuming, never stop buying, and never stop trying.
Perfection is a business model.
I know this.
I have known this for a while.
I have spent a long time trying to believe that I was somehow above the expectations of perfection, but the truth is less than flattering. I don’t just expect perfection of myself, I expect it from others, too.
I do not advertise this. It does not come up in polite conversation. But I have a standard, an internal one, and when the people I love fall short of it, I punish them. Quietly. I withdraw. I go somewhere inside myself, and close a door. And I tell myself it is self-protection. And maybe some of it is. But some of it, if I am being ruthlessly fair, is just disappointment wearing the mask of a boundary.
There is a kind of arrogance in that. In deciding, silently, who someone should be, and then resenting them for not arriving there.
I am not proud of that.
Self-awareness is a strange gift. It does not stop the behaviour. It just illuminates it. It lets you watch yourself fail in real time, and then decide whether you will do anything about it. Self-awareness is not the same as self-correction, but it is the beginning of it. I catch the hand reaching for the door. I ask myself what I am actually doing, and why. I like to believe that I try, genuinely try, to evolve past the conditioning. To patch the holes in my thinking as I discover them. To be better than the version of me that was assembled without my consent.
I am trying. That counts for something. I have to believe that.
But also, from this height of self-awareness, I can see the same thing happening in reverse.
There are people in my life who have put me on a pedestal. Those who have decided, for their own reasons, their need for a hero, or their desire for something solid to believe in, that I am more than I am. They have placed a halo above my head that I did not ask for and cannot quite reach. They have built an idea of me that is taller and sturdier and more luminous than the actual me, the one who is uncertain and inconsistent and very much still figuring things out.
And at first, it almost feels like kindness. Like being seen. Like being believed in. But it does not stay that way. Because a pedestal is not a gift. It is a position you are expected to maintain. And the higher it is, the less room there is to be human. Because a pedestal is not a place you stand. It is a place you are trapped. It is narrow, unstable, and there is no room to move without disappointing someone. Every flaw becomes more visible from that height. Every misstep feels like a betrayal of who they decided you should be.
And when I fall, and I will fall, I always fall, because the pedestal is too small and the halo is too heavy, they act as though I have done something to them. As though I have broken a promise I never made. As though I misrepresented myself, instead of simply revealing myself.
But I never asked to be placed up there.
I did not request the halo. I did not commission the pedestal. I showed up as myself, messy and evolving and occasionally brilliant and often wrong, and someone decided that was not enough and so they built a better version in their head and put my name on it. And now I am somehow accountable for the gap between their fiction and my reality. That gap is where the resentment lives. There is something deeply unfair about being measured against a version of yourself you did not create, but are still expected to live up to. There is something deeply unfair about being judged against an image you did not create.
And yet…
If I stay honest…
I do the same thing.
Maybe not as visibly, or as dramatically. But I do it. I build quiet pedestals for other people. I decide who they are allowed to be, how consistent they should be, and how much grace I am willing to extend before I start withdrawing it. So the resentment folds back on itself.
I am both the one standing on the pedestal and the one building it.
This is what we do to each other, unfortunately. We demand a perfection we cannot ourselves produce. We build people into monuments and then grieve them when they turn out to be human.
We are all just trying to survive this floating rock. This spaceship is hurtling us through a universe that has never once asked our opinion on the destination. We did not choose to be here. We did not get to draft the terms. We arrived, already behind, already imperfect, already carrying the weight of every expectation that had been waiting for us before we even knew what expectations were.
So maybe the grace we are looking for is smaller than perfection. Maybe the order inside the chaos is that we let each other be unfinished. That we retire the halos. That we stop building pedestals for people who are just trying to stand.
I am trying to be better than my conditioning. I think that is all any of us can honestly offer.
It is not perfect.
But it should be enough.