"Hi, I am Saige, and I am a Perfectionist."

I think that if I had just started my first therapy session with that, we could have saved a great deal of time getting to the core of my emotional and mental issues. Instead we had to muck through a bunch of other baggage.

So, here I am now, a recovering Perfectionist. My last session of therapy my Therapist told me she was proud of me and we needn’t reschedule, just call her when I needed her again. (I think she has a great grasp of how job security works.) I was leaving her office with new eyes. I decided to pick up a book I had read twice before titled, “The Gift of Imperfections” by Brene’ Brown. I thought reading it this time, I might actually get what she was trying to say. Previously, I had gotten done reading it, and been like -”I am good. I don’t have any of these problems.” I have all these problems.

Brene’ Brown is a social scientist, who dedicated her work to studying Shame and Vulnerability. She talks about the armor we build to deal with not wanting to feels these emotions… because they suck. I own my armor now. My armor is perfectionism. I throw that shield everywhere. Growing up I thought I had to earn my love, earn my acceptance, earn my worth. So, in Brene’s words, I hustled for it. I worked and worked to steer clear of disappointing anyone. Good enough, is not good enough. I can not be average, or ordinary, because I equated this with being meaningless. This toxic thinking has hindered every aspect of my life. It snuck into my marriage as co-dependency issues that really hurt me, my husband, and our relationship. It is the core of my anxiety. It had cheated me of valuable growing experiences. My perfectionism was, and still is, toxic to my ability live a full life.

In her book “Daring Greatly” Brene’ quotes a friend of her’s who is an artist, Nick Wilton.

“I always felt that someone, a long time ago, organized the affairs of the world into areas that made sense – categories of stuff that is perfectible, things that fit neatly in perfect bundles. The world of business, for example, is this way – line items, spreadsheets, things that add up, that can be perfected. The legal system – not always perfect – but nonetheless a mind-numbing effort to actually write down all kinds of laws and instructions that cover all aspects of being human, a kind of umbrella code of conduct we should all follow.

Perfection is crucial in building an aircraft, a bridge, or a high-speed train. The code and mathematics residing just below the surface of the Internet is also this way. Things are either perfectly right or they will not work. So much of the world we work and live in is based upon being correct, being perfect.

But after this someone got through organizing everything just perfectly, he (or probably a she) was left with a bunch of stuff that didn’t fit anywhere – things in a shoe box that had to go somewhere. So, in desperation, this person threw up her arms and said, “OK! Fine. All the rest of this stuff that isn’t perfectible, that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else, will just have to  be piled into this last, rather large, tattered box that we can sort of push behind the couch. Maybe later we can come back and figure where it all is supposed to fit in.”  Let’s label the box ART.

The problem was, thankfully, never fixed, and in time the box overflowed as more and more art piled up. I think the dilemma exists because art, among all the other tidy categories, most closely resembles what it is like to be human. To be alive. It is our nature to be imperfect. To have uncategorized feelings and emotions. To make or do things that don’t sometimes necessarily make sense. Art is all just perfectly imperfect. Once the word Art enters the description of what you’re up to, it is almost like getting a hall pass from perfection. It thankfully releases us from any expectation of perfection…”

In our last session my therapist told me. “You know the scriptures aren’t literal, right. When God says be perfect even as I am perfect. He isn’t being literal. He is almost never literal.”

It’s neither the time or the place for us to be perfect in this life. In fact, I believe this is our time to be perfectly imperfect. I am a daughter of God. I am his creation. I am his work of art. Art is perfectly imperfect. If you disagree. We can agree to disagree. I am cool with that.

So, I am putting my armor down. It’s heavy and I am tired. I am now vulnerable, exposed, and uncomfortable…. But I am real, perfectly real.