My Attachment to “Perfection”
The last few months (and the last several weeks, especially) brought me much needed opportunity for rest and reflection. Instead of mindlessly sharing things online, it’s been really nice to sit back and listen to what my friends have been saying.
Giving myself this space has brought me face-to-face with some of my less than ideal qualities, and allowed me to confront my energy-sucking attachments. It has been humbling. And in my effort to be more honest online, I feel compelled to share one of my revelations.
More so than material items/things, my attachment is a concept: let’s call it “perfection”. When I was younger in my yoga journey, I thought of attachments as tangible and palpable things, such as shoes, money, status, and a life plan. More recently, I understand it’s possible for us to become attached to more complex, abstract things too, such as ideas, concepts, and feelings. These less clear-cut attachments are usually connected to the tangible things, and are equally as draining. I’ll explain.
My attachment to “perfection” has manifested itself in different ways over the course of my life. Some arguably “good” such as fussing over the little details on my homework assignments, and as a result, receiving high grades in school. And some arguably “bad” such as picking apart and obsessing over my body image as a teenager/young adult, measuring my self worth by the number of my achieved goals, equating rest with failure, and (still) thinking too often about how other people perceive me. Safe to say this is a complicated, abstract, subconscious, and multidimensional concept I was (am) attached to. And it’s connected to my actions, my priorities, and my time.
A surface-level dictionary search tells me “perfect” means having all the required or desirable elements. Well, don’t we all desire different things, which are unique to our individual characters and informed by our individual experiences? Don’t our desires change over time? In effect, this means there is no such thing as a universal concept of “perfect” (there can’t be). So in some sense, I’ve spent a lot of my life attached to a concept that is, at its essence, non-existent. And I don’t think I fully grasped how exhausting this has been for me.
2020 has tested me in many ways and opened my eyes to certain aspects of myself that I am ready to part with. I’ve come to believe that letting go of my attachment to “perfection” necessitates allowing myself to live in line with my own set of desired traits. This, of course, is in contrast to living in line with traits I think others may find desirable about me.
For example, some days I feel like I haven’t hit a milestone or achieved a goal since last year, and I feel imperfect. Those days I remind myself that slow and steady wins the race and enjoying the journey (towards a goal, or otherwise) has always felt good to me.
For the first time in some time I feel like I am my favourite work in progress—messy and so flawed but evolving, forward-looking, and happy.
This is my new definition of perfect.