Negative belief #452: “I don’t have it together.”

Maybe having it together has nothing to do with those benchmarks of graduation, certification, publication, validation?
Maybe having it together isn’t about someone else’s notion of 
achievement. Or being better than anyone else. 
Or that winning makes someone else a loser. 
Or that trying and failing is somehow shameful. 
That you have to be balanced all the time.

New belief: “I am on a journey, doing my best. Imperfect.”

That means when the anxious zinging starts, the uneasiness arises—I can just FEEL it and stop trying to bargain it away, hoping when I do THIS or THAT—whatever new thing I find lacking, like say, being organized—that when I achieve that thing, I will be “together” at last.

Imperfect. Not great, never was. See what is, and build from there. Stop pretending. Let what is reveal itself.

Perfection is deception. Perfection is a poison pill packaged and sold next to the botox and collagen injections. Perfection is the woman on a pedestal who cannot squish mud between her polished toenails. Some warped white-washed selfish notion of perfection, I think, lies behind the toxic, racist Make America Great Again slogan—the notion that rewriting the past will coat every ugly truth in the golden light of remembered sunsets past, and save us from ourselves. No. Recovery from perfections micro and macro requires seeing what is, ugly, messy, real.

I will treat you gently, Perfection. You are bone-china blue-white transparent, so damned fragile. I pack you up in a pine box, swaddle you in virgin cotton balls grown and picked by browner hands in hot sun, oh porcelain beauty, flowers fine painted with single-hair brushes by small hands in some far-off land, petaled curves over and over perfect, while outside the sun and rain and wind are lost, years are lost, squinting childhood away, lost.

Perfection, you voracious beautiful wicked thing. I hold you, marveling at how I carried you proudly all those years, thinking it was an honor, my duty, my job?

I’d smash you, and maybe I should? But I fear I’d want to reassemble you somehow, find a way to make you whole again—and so I would waste more time.

Because you are just what you are, shiny prize, symbol of false wholeness.

I will nestle you in this little wooden box, so like a coffin.

I will bury you outside in the moonlight before the hard frost comes, bury you under the cherry tree with all the other beliefs I have, at last, I hope, outgrown.