The Perfectly Imperfect.
Today marks global mental health day, and I want to share a bit about the most crucial part of my current state of self — as I also want to give a major appreciation to people who are still struggling to define themselves, or those who are still stuck in the same ends, or even those who are constantly working on their progress. This is my personal story I want to share — as I am also a forever subject in progress. :)
I think we’ve all been there; making some wild, impulsively wrong decisions in life that lead us to ask, “Why the hell did I do that?”. While it’s such a normal thing to do, our human brains sometimes can’t stop thinking of things we should’ve done – because our minds are always trapped with the idea of perfection. Our minds are constantly chasing the impeccable pictures that should be achieved.
Over the past weeks, I’ve been contemplating many things inside my head. I met quite a few new people from my new job, and finally met my master’s degree colleagues offline after almost two years of only knowing them from screens. I gained new connections as I also realized… I felt a bit exhausted at the same time.
I’ve always been the quiet one whenever I meet new acquaintances. I used to think it was all because I was such a shy person and felt insecure all the time, but nowadays I do believe that it’s just that I don’t really like to share my things with others. Of course, my best friends and my partner are exceptional.
But there were a lot of times I felt like, I should’ve done better in terms of everything – including my communications with other people. I got bullied when I was younger just because I don’t like to talk, and it taught me to hate myself even more until the point that I could sometimes pretend to be like other people, I was dishonest to myself — and it led me to make so many wrong choices in life. I was hungry to be someone I was not.
According to Gavin (1988) there are five stages of healing; which I somehow relate to life stages in general as well — and the most significant phases are when you can go through the 4 difficult stages (grief/denial, anger, bargaining, and depression). I have talked about this a lot in my previous writings, on how struggling I was for the past years, a lot of contemplations, ups and downs, until I began to see life in a more beautiful scenery… And a lot of relapses when I threw myself back into a pit of the slump.
And finally… the final stage of acceptance; a stage when you neither feel happy nor sad about the situation you are in right now… A moment when you can finally see life in a much bigger picture than you did before, a moment when you finally accept life as it is. As how imperfect it was, and will always be.
Am I there yet? Well, I don’t quite sure about it.
What I’m sure of is that I see life in many different views every day. I re-learned about myself a lot. I observed how I always used to think, how I used to react, and how I used to decide on things. I re-evaluated wrong decisions as the most significant lesson learned (as cheesy as it sounds), just like what one instructor taught me: we can become better people by constantly learning from our mistakes.
And sometimes it’s indeed such a lonely journey. I realized that it’s so difficult for me now to relate with people, especially new ones, as I had established healthy boundaries to protect myself and the people I genuinely care about. I know it’s a bit selfish as it might sound but you know it doesn’t when you realize it’s for your own good. Prioritizing yourself means you are aware of your patterns, and you can later prevent yourself from deciding the same mistakes you’ve always made before.
I learned the Japanese philosophy term ‘wabi-sabi’; perfectly imperfect. This term rejects the pursuit of perfection and embraces the reality of imperfection. And it can help us escape the hamster wheel of chasing an ideal life and teaches us to appreciate existence as it is. This perfectly described the whole point of my contemplation these days. As I am still in progress (and will forever be), I will take every wrong decision I made as the perfectly imperfect reality that made me who I am right now. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I forgave people who hurt me in the past, but I did forgive myself for hurting myself even more, and those times when I walked away from my real being.
;
