I'm not perfect?

A man I met named Edwin Edeberi once told me, “Practice doesn’t make perfect.  Practice makes improvement.”  When I first heard him say it, I liked the way it sounded and how it felt, but I couldn’t truly make sense of it.  When you move through childhood and two decades of your adult life with a perfectionist complex, integrating new data that is completely counterintuitive is at best impossible.

While I’ve tried to analyze where perfectionism began - Was it a coping mechanism? Did I get addicted to praise and gold stickers at an early age? - I’ve moved to acceptance that it just is what it is.  The choice I have in each present moment is to recognize that being perfect is impossible, that I am enough the way I am, and to take small steps over time to move away from it.  Failure is okay.  It happens to everybody.  A lot.

I did not seem to suffer from many personal failures in my youth: I skipped fourth grade.  I was first chair baritone for the state of Alaska. I graduated at 16.  I was married when I was 21, and securities licensed far younger than most.  So when really hard moments came at me in my late 20s, I was badly unprepared to cope.  Divorced at 27.  Stock market collapse at 28.  Bankruptcy at 29.  DUI at 32.  Liver nearly failing because of alcohol abuse at 32.  When these failures/mistakes occurred, I fell into deep rabbit holes.  I hated who I saw in the mirror.  My anxiety spiked.  Instead of addressing the symptoms, I put on a mask instead, of someone where everything to an outsider looked okay.  I was cheerful and engaging on the outside, coached little league teams, ran a business, but never ever let anyone in.  It was my armor, so that no one knew what a low opinion I had of myself. Loneliness and an inability to communicate what I was feeling led to resentment and anger, and I nuked all of these feelings with a hail of different narcotics. This was my primary coping mechanism.

Accepting that I’m enough now has been a result of years of hard work.  I did what once seemed unimaginable and I talked it about.  I surrendered over and over again what I was carrying to my therapist, to people I trusted, and most importantly to God.  While I once dreamed of national recognition, or at least a spotlight to follow me around so that others would wonder, “Who’s that special guy right there?”, what I’ve found is that the lasting undercurrent of joy comes from opening the doors for others, and talking about my journey.  Sharing the personal failures out loud in the hopes that others who are going through hard moments, don't feel alone like I did. This vulnerability helps heal me, and is one of the most important parts about maintaining deep and meaningful relationships with others.

A few weeks ago, I told my group of guys that if my true purpose in life is to open doors for others to step through, then it will be life well lived.  It is enough for me knowing that I'm someone who's dependable, and that sharing all of my story can aid in lifting the next person up. It’s a restless demon, perfectionism, one that I know I’ll continue to wrestle with, but it’s awareness of it that helps me get better and better at putting it back down.  It is an extremely special thing to be calm and present now in comparison to how I used to live; a freedom that I'm incredibly grateful for.  I know now that I am enough just the way I am, living a life spent improving, making slow but steady progress.