I have spent a giant chunk of my life trying to be as perfect as possible, trying, thinking, and working hard at being a person that I am not.
I know this is all cheesy, all stuff that many people could write about their life, but it is said and confessed often because it is still happening, it is still fact.
We melt ourselves and work to pour ourselves back into a mold that is too small and too generic to contain all of our "us"-ness.
A friend once shared with me an insight about life she had picked up along the way. As a fellow human attempting to squeeze herself into a faux life, she told me that she had realized that others actually WANT to know the real us. People don't want to know the fake, harshly "perfect" and dry us. They want us in all of our curves of personality, all of our twists, all of our falling on our face.
People want YOU to be YOU!
Not a perfect, plastic, empty version of you. A living, loving, breathing human being.
It isn't that impressive to be flawless. People don't actually like that. That makes people feel inadequate. That perpetuates the cycle of fakeness.
It is much more impressive to see how you recover from things.
It's kind of impressive to hear a flawless performance of a song, but it's more impressive to see someone miss a note and continue with a soft smile.
It's kind of impressive to watch a team play a perfect game and win, but it's more impressive to see a team lose and greet the winners with a genuine "good game."
BUT
Our softness can also become a costume we put on.
Our graceful recoveries aren't really graceful if they're just pretend.
We have to let go, and grow, in a slow pace.
We don't grow into this grace and joy and ease of life by reading the right books, listening to the right podcasts, doing the right things. These actions aren't bad, but if we're faking it by doing them, then we're faking it, and we're back to square one.
We grow by letting go of the trying and leaning into the training. Listening to the Light of Christ inside of us.
The Light of the Spirit has always been inside of our hearts, ready to guide, always loving.
And when we are able to let go and lean in, then we are able to grow more into the real lights we were created to emulate.
Consider letting go of perfection and falsity. The life you will find in the process is so much more freeing and valuable than the life that you worked hard to create.
Have grace, show grace, live grace.
You have everything you need.