As a proud perfectionist, I started exploring the ‘self help’ genre about four years ago. I gravitated towards this genre because I saw it as a way – according to the testimonials a sure fire way – to fix my life. I felt incredibly inadequate, and I hoped that by doing the exercises I could become the person who could do the work that I aspired to do. That’s what it all came down to in the end. I thought that the road from dreaming to doing required a vehicle (a self) with wheels pumped with perfection (I hoped that an ingredient of perfection was helium), and I was pretty sure that my tires were currently flat.

I saw self-help as a gas station. I thought that the best way to move forward in time was to pump myself full of knowledge, and then to start following the steps. I even made a spreadsheet.

For several years, I’ve nourished my ambitious mind with the promise of this assumption. I’ve studied diligently, woken up early (for awhile, obnoxiously early…. I’m talking 5:30AM), listened to podcasts while sprinting on the treadmill, meditated (almost) daily, journaled over coffee, and written about how close I was getting to the perfection I believed was a prerequisite for speech.

The difference between dreaming and doing is recognition, something  that only ever seems to occur in reality. I want to contribute, in a significant way, to the conversations happening around me. I just don’t want to do it wrong. And recognition and criticism veer off from one another at an uncomfortably close proximity. This makes me uncomfortable.

The problem is that time doesn’t behave like a ‘choose your own adventure book’. I can’t actually stick my thumb in a decision and refer back to it if the one I made doesn’t work out. The future will never happen until we get there, and we can only do it once. This is frustrating to me, because it’s high on my list of priorities to make this once the ‘right’ once.

This is the lure of self-help for me. But if others have had the same experience, I think there is something that we’ve collectively missed.

This is what I’ve come to believe:
Perfection is a lousy element to be filled with.

It’s more likely to put a hole in our tires than it is to facilitate any sort of elevated acceleration. Perfection is fueled by anticipation, not arrival. It relies on the belief that although we’re definitely not perfect now, we can be… This coveted state has very little (maybe nothing) to do with the present, and more to do with a past that those of us who chase this state try to smooth out into a ramp that will propel us into a future that we can now live in comfortably; thrive in successfully.

And although taking an industrial strength sander to our lives really does seem like a legitimately good, completely rational, idea… more than once I’ve found myself standing in a moment of life that I’d once dreamed about, afraid to move. Believing that I only belonged in this moment as a memory. Not as someone alive and breathing.

If you had the option of taking a photo of your most memorable ‘now’ to then put together in a giant collage, with mine and theirs, to encircle the earth with perfection, and then saying ‘the end’… would you? Is that life? Perhaps a life that we don’t believe includes us, and as I’ve sometimes bought into this belief, I have to admit that this image is tempting to me.

“Driven to do our best at school, on the job, in our relationships – in every corner of lives – we try to make ourselves into works of art. Working so hard to create our own perfection we forget that we are human beings….”
Marion Woodman from her book ‘Addiction to Perfection.’

To be perfect (by definition) is to be flawless. But what exactly is a flaw? I looked it up in an online thesaurus. Here are some synonyms: blemish, failing, weakness, glitch.

Translated to human terms: a blemish is like a scar (a mark on the living vehicle – your body – you’ve driven through a life, still in progress); a failing is an occurrence which J.K Rowling famously described as being impossible to live without doing “unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default,” weakness is reminiscent for me of words like vulnerability, mortality and love; a glitch is something that occurs in an improperly calculated algorithm (I think… although I’m not a math person).

So in other words… a perfect human would look like this:

• Consistent through time and circumstance.
• With a body unmarred by neither heartbreak nor joy.
• Who performs without error (no learning curve necessary) 100% of the time.
• And is essentially a psychopath.

My fellow perfectionists: we are creatures attempting to be machines. A machine isn’t ready until it’s done, and we’ve taught ourselves that the same is true for us. But it’s not. Just like water, we are in constant motion. Always evolving. Stronger than initially perceived, but also fluid and prone to reinterpretation on a whim.

Perfection is what makes us trust a machine, but what makes us trust a human are things like joy, curiosity and bravery.

• Joy – to smile without tension and to value one’s own happiness.
• Curiosity – to question answers, and to follow one’s own impulses.
• Bravery – to believe and trust in one’s own ideas, and to share the inner workings of one’s otherwise invisible imagination with others.

And the other thing that makes us trust a human?

Their flaws. The exact thing which sabotages perfection, actually allows us to connect with one another. Our flaws help us to recognize in each other, ourselves. This is how we connect. And when we see that sparkle in another’s eyes, and we comment on their gaze, what we’re really commenting on is the distance we see that they’ve travelled and the life they’ve lived.

Like a flawk (flock) of birds, supporting one another in flight, our imperfections – the parts of us that don’t perform according to popular expectation – are the tools that will lead to our greatest contributions. We’re here together, but together doesn’t mean ‘the same.’

I started this exploration by talking about self-help.

I’d like to clarify that I’m not suggesting that the self-help genre isn’t valuable. I think that it is. But I think it’s important to collectively acknowledge that the goal of this genre is not to create seven billion lists perpetually crossed off (let’s be honest… how interesting could that be?), but to facilitate self-awareness, and to introduce us to the depths of our beings, so we can then understand who we are and what we really want, maybe even need, to say.

Perhaps a better title for this genre would be ‘self-exploration’. Actually… that’s what I think I’m going to start calling it. Because self-exploration puts the power back into our hands. It turns us from doctors into adventurers, and I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a little more fun to me.

This is what I believe:

That we are a collection of stories collaborating and interacting with one another. So many of us have been spending our narratives searching for the ideal we were tricked into casting as the protagonist… but we really could have cast ourselves. We still can.

“If you own this story, you get to write the ending.”
– Brene Brown, ‘Daring Greatly’

Featured artwork by Eva Lewarne: Enigma 1

Eva Lewarne was born in Poland and came to Canada after completing high school. In Canada she attended U of T, then OCAD, majoring in Fine Art. Her last body of work Enigma and Illusion are influenced by her many years of meditation practice in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.

Learn more about her paintings: www.evalewarne.com
and photography: www.evalew.com