I’m not perfect. I never claimed to be.

But for some reason when I fall short of perfection my brain tells me that I’ve failed at something that should have been possible.

The reality is that nobody’s perfect. Expecting it of ourselves or even thinking that other people might be it… can be highly damaging.

I tweeted the words below a while back. For a moment I found words to explain how seeing others as perfect can be damaging. But it didn’t occur to me at the time that seeing myself as needing to be perfect, could damage me.

So I’m going to change some of the words and put the link to the original tweet thread below the changed version:

It’s not complimentary to see oneself as flawless.

Rather, it’s damaging to have such high expectations of oneself because nobody is perfect.

The only place we can go from flawless, in our own estimation, is down.

My expectation to be flawless is unfair to me to have to live up to.

It’s also unfair to believe I could be perfect since I may then misinterpret my very real flaws as deliberate acts of bad character and personal toxicity.

We all have struggles, nobody is perfect. To ignore that reality where I am concerned is to set myself up for failure.

And it really sucks to have that expectation of perfection put on myself by anyone.

So don’t view yourself as perfect, Aria. No matter how much you may want to be or think you should be, you aren’t.

It is not a compliment to see anyone as perfect or able to achieve perfection.

It’s a helluva lot of pressure to put on myself. I’m not at all perfect because nobody is.

Original – click to see the entire thread:

So I sit here thinking and wondering why I’m holding myself to this standard of potential perfection when I already put into words how damaging that idea could be.

Weeks ago.

It makes me feel less uncomfortable when I expect perfection of myself than when others do. Perhaps because my impossible standards have been with me my entire life while other people’s (whether real or imagined) are a relatively new thing.

But this fear of failure, of messing up, of hurting people (accidentally), of mis-speaking, of being misunderstood…. is one of the very things causing me to fail, mess up, hurt people, mis-speak, and be misunderstood.

Perhaps “fear” isn’t even the right word. It’s more anxiety about things I have yet to even be able to put into words (and subsequent anxiety about my lack of ability to put them into words).

This is another thing I expect perfection from myself with. Words.

When the words aren’t there, I don’t know what to do.