Perfection is Illusion

You don’t have to be perfect to be ready.

You don’t have to know how to do something all the way before you make an attempt.

Perfectionism moonlights as procrastination, and procrastination is a great cover for avoiding vulnerability.

If we can keep our ideas safe in our heads, our words safe in a “draft”, our feelings safe in our journals, our plans safe in our whispers, our dreams safe in our sleep, we risk nothing.

But there, tucked away out of sight, our dreams fade away, our plans crumble like an abandoned home, our feelings shrivel, our words lose their meaning, our ideas quietly are replaced by more practical concerns.

And we die before we’ve died.

If you want to live, you will have to set boundaries. You will have to have hard conversations. You will have to feel all the uncomfortable, true things you have numbed and escaped and minimized and silenced. You will need to be honest with the person you have been the most dishonest with your entire life: yourself.

At first, this is going to be very, very difficult. You aren’t used to the sharp edges of emotion. You haven’t built up the resilience yet to stand your ground. Your tender, new growth feels fragile, sacred, vulnerable.

You will need to embrace the truth that you aren’t in control. You never were.

You don’t have to have all the answers. You can’t possibly.

But you can do the best with what you have. And that’s all you need to live a wildly free, extraordinary life. When we brave the unknown, knees shaking, hands sweating, heart beating out of our chests, breath catching in our throats,

we are living.

On the other side of revealing ourselves, being truly seen, truly known for who we are, is sweet, hard-won growth.