Not Letting Perfect Become the Enemy of Good.

One of my favorite quotes is from a book I didn’t really like. It says: “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

It’s from East of Eden, a John Steinbeck novel I read more to understand the references that kept coming up in my college English classes than for pleasure. I also happened to push through the majority of the novel while on a tour bus in Greece that had a penchant for driving full speed ahead along winding mountain roads, so there’s that.

Basically, my lack of enjoyment may not have been Steinbeck’sfault at all.

I don’t remember much of the story (I guess the whole understanding-what-was-going-on-in-class thing didn’t pan out super well), but that quote will forever be seared into my continually-grasping-at-perfection, anxiety-prone brain.

Because it’s the opposite of how I usually feel.

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect”—what?! But I have to be perfect. I’m not good unless I’m perfect. Good is the less-than-okay sibling-no-one-brings-up-because-she’s-not-doing-so-hot antithesis to perfect.

I can’t be good, I have to be perfect.

And that’s exactly how “perfect” ended up becoming the enemyof “good” in my life.

Yesterday, I saw a counselor for the first time ever. And no, this wasn’t the school counselor type you go to when you’re stressed about grades. Instead, this was a licensed, professional Christian counselor with an office, certificates on the walls, waiting room—the whole shebang.

We talked about a lot of things while I sat in her overly-plushchair, but one thing we talked a lot about was anxiety, and the (false) feelingthat I’m always just one mistake away from losing all the people I care so muchabout.

That it’s all going to come crumbling down if I make one falsemove.

That I’m dangling on the precipice of everyone finding out “whoI really am” and deciding right then and there that they don’t want anything todo with me.

That they’re all about to leave and I just don’t know ityet.

Yep, good stuff.

There’s a lot composing those feelings of not being enough leading to impending loss—a lot of insecurities, circumstances I couldn’t control, and coming to grips with who I am as a person—but while those are all issues I’m taking a deeper look at myself, the perfectionism I see at play day in and day out is, I think, my way of preventing those bad things from happening.

Case in point: I tend to believe that if I’m always the best kind of person to be around, if I’m always perfect, no one will want to leave.

But the thing is, through no fault of our own, sometimes ourperfect isn’t perfect enough.

We lose friends, or, at the very least, grow distant.

Parents break up, even when it most likely had nothing whatsoeverto do with us.

Disagreements happen, and sometimes words are exchanged that can’t be taken back.

That’s just life, but circumstances don’t have to become ouridentities. We don’t have to be walking around scars of what’s happened (or inmy case, what I’m afraid will happen) to us. We can refuse to let perfectbecome the enemy of good.

I don’t know about you, but I for one don’t want to live my life constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, to be perched on my seat with a false sense of perfectionistic-induced guilt anticipating that everything’s going to fall apart soon, just you wait. I don’t want to let the false thoughts my anxiety dictates to me become the truth I share with others. I just don’t.

So, instead, I’m simply going to be good. I’m going be okay, even when you’re not okay with me. I’m going to slowly build the muscle memory to know that a disappointment doesn’t define me to me or to other people. I’m going to attempt to live knowing that I don’t have to be perfect to be good.

What about you?

Even just sitting here in my favorite coffee shop, I’mthinking about how the only perfect person to ever walk the earth, Jesus, hadeveryone abandon him when it mattered most. He was literally perfect, yeteveryone, and I mean everyone, left him. I know that’s not the rosiest exampleof what I’m trying to get at here, but if even God in man couldn’t controlother people’s reactions, how can we ever expect to? And even more so, whywould we even want to?

We can’t control what we can’t control (i.e. people, their responses, circumstances), but what we can control is how we choose to see ourselves—under the microscope of never being perfect enough or through the kinder, gentler lens of doing our best and watching to see what unfolds.

Starting today I’m working towards the latter. Trying and failing and laughing along the way as perfect slowly loses its animosity towards good—good learning to shine all on its own, stripped of the insurmountable weight of perfection.

words by Kaylyn Deiter and photo by Kailin Richardson