As the night drags on, the TV tends to get worse. If it’s not talk shows or infomercials, reality TV flashes on the limited channels into the night. I find myself sucked into the drama of last week’s episodes, glasses crashing onto the table as women raise their voices in a crowded room. As the voices get louder, you can see the people around these women turning to stare: a spectacle of human existence. Tragic.
I can’t help but judge. I like to believe that I would never be them, that I keep my tone calm in front of strangers. I like to believe that these women lead completely different lives than me. They have more money, husbands, children, they drive fancy cars and eat in restaurants I couldn’t dream of affording. However, as I watch these shows more, and more, I find myself drawing parallels to my life.
They complain about their relationships, feeling left behind by their confident and successful significant others. They talk about their insecurities, the way they hate their arm fat or their nose. These women talk about not feeling comfortable in their social circles, they worry about being left behind by those that surround them. The characters on the screen, these women, mimic my deepest and darkest insecurities.
Forget the thrown glasses and million dollar mansions, they have the same aspirations as I do- that someday life will be ‘perfect’.
But what is perfect?
It varies from person to person. They may think perfection is having billions of dollars, rich husbands, and expensive clothes; I may believe perfection is a comfortable quiet home or the bustle of an office. Perfection is different for everyone, but we all strive towards it.
‘Someday, someday, someday’ we all hope to get there, don’t we? We all hope that perfection will come knocking at our doorstep as we eat our breakfast. But perfection is hard, and just like the women in the late night TV world, we struggle to deal with our ‘imperfect’ lives. All of our insecurities hold us back from achieving our perceived perfection.
I haven’t met one person in the world that says they are perfect. They may have insecurities about superficial things, like their hair or clothes, but insecurities can lay deeper in a person’s psyche. Most believe they can never be perfect, and that ‘someday’ is a far off fantasy, unable to be achieved.
My late night thoughts on perfection and imperfection cannot be solved as easily as I want to believe. You can never get rid of all of your insecurities, but you can learn to live with them. Perfection is a societal construct, something that is so ingrained in us from birth, that we can’t let it go. But to be happy, to get our ‘someday’, we need to.
I can’t be a hypocrite and say you all should learn to live with your insecurities, it’s hard. Learning to live with those bad thoughts is the hardest thing a person can do. Accepting that you are not ‘perfect’ is a hurdle that no weak man can take on. I do believe, however, that you can do it in time.
Accept your stretch marks and big thighs, accept your long nose and small eyes, accept your sometimes difficult hair and short arms; they are beautiful and so are you. If you don’t learn to accept yourself then you will never end up happy, you will always be striving to achieve something that may be impossible.
Look at yourself in the mirror and know that your ‘someday’ is achievable, that someday you will be happy with what you see.
If you don’t start doing that, then you may end up throwing a glass of wine on a ‘frenemy’ when you’re 50 years old, and nobody wants that.
–E
The Two Sides of Lonely 