It's Okay Not To Be Perfect
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Health and Wellness

It's Okay Not To Be Perfect

Well-rounded individuals are not emblems of perfection.

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It's Okay Not To Be Perfect
Photo by Fischer Twins on Unsplash

When I was five, I was so excited for Kindergarten to start.I thought it would be this great new adventure, wherein I made friends immediately and we all painted together and played tag at recess.Yet the first day of school proved not to be what I expected.

I can’t remember the details of the school day, but I remember the bus ride home.I was sitting on the green bumpy seat and there was a hole in the back of the chair in front of me.Years later, I would occupy myself pulling the fluff out.I remember looking out the window and sort of doing a checklist with myself.Backpack? Check.Coat?Check.Happy?

I caught my reflection in the window and noticed that I was not smiling. Smiling, I knew, was the telltale sign that someone was happy.It concerned me that I wasn’t beaming from cheek-to-cheek.In that moment, I think I realized that day hadn’t been what I had hoped it to be, and this concerned me. I don’t even know if it was a particularly bad day.

Maybe it was just overwhelming, or maybe it hadn’t been what I expected. All I knew was that I didn’t feel content, and this bothered me.I don’t think I wanted to face that it had been a bad day because the day hadn’t fit my dream of what it would be, I decided to compensate by placing a huge grin on my face.And I kept that grin on my face for the rest of the bus ride, because when I arrived at the bus stop, I wanted my mom and dad to see that I had had a wonderful first day of school.

Of course, my fake smile did nothing to fool them. My mom told me in later years that she could tell I wasn’t genuinely happy because I wasn’t smiling with my eyes. That was a factor that I had not taken into account when I was in Kindergarten.

For the next few years, whenever I had a bad day or just felt off, as one does sometimes, I came home with a fake smile plastered on my face. My mom would ask me what was wrong and I would say ‘nothing’, after all, couldn’t she see the smile on my face?

I think that at that age it was hard to comprehend my emotions or why I was feeling the way I was.All I knew was, happy was the ideal so I always aimed for that.

I must have been in second or third grade when my mom told me, “You know, it’s okay to be sad.You’re allowed to feel that way. You don’t want to ball up any sadness or frustration inside.If you feel it, you can let it out.”

I think that this was a really important lesson for me at that age, and it has guided me over the years in my understanding of myself.I’m a pretty happy person, and whenever I find that I’m not, it disturbs me at first.I still have to remind myself that it is okay to feel these other emotions, but I’m getting better at it, and I’ve learned that it feels great to cry sometimes.Even if you don’t have a particular reason, it’s good to just kind of let it all out every once in a while.

I think as a kid I equated happiness with perfection.I wanted to be the perfect person that was always contented with life and happy-go-lucky. I didn’t want to feel any emotions that I deemed ugly like angry, jealous or impatient.

I held onto this wish so dearly that even when I was feeling these other emotions, I found myself denying it, and I let these emotions bottled up inside of me, which only let them grow larger.This only resulted in me feeling more unsettled and upset, which only dimmed my outlook on myself as well as the world around me.

These days, I see a lot of people who aspire to be ‘perfect’.With social media, I think that everyone feels like they’re on display for everyone else constantly.People always want to show that they are perfectly contented and that their life is as perfect and fun and happy as it can be.We all know that behind those smiling faces and chipper status updates, people are dealing with their own real-life problems behind the screen.

Yet this is hard to comprehend.It’s hard to look beyond the screen.So people end up believing that their own lives are inadequate because they are not as happy as others appear online.Consequentially, when people ask them how they are doing they say “Great!”, or at the very least, “fine”, because there is a stigma against feeling anything less than content.

It can be easy to fall into a mindset where you’re always trying to convince yourself as well as others that you are doing just fine. But this is a reminder that it is okay to feel discontent.It’s okay, and even healthy, to feel overwhelmed, frustrated and upset. The important thing is to acknowledge this feeling so that you can let it go.

If you can change the thing in your life that is making you feel this way, acknowledging it is the first step to changing it.If you can’t change it, then allow yourself to be unhappy.Well-rounded individuals are not emblems of perfection. Well-rounded individuals have faced every kind of emotion, and come out stronger and smarter on the other side.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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