By Belle Potter | senior | East Lansing High School
[This work comes from the Art of Storytelling class, taught by Julia Satterthwaite.]
We’re all flawed.
We yearn for the sweet validation of being right, wincing when we hear we’re wrong. If control is in the hands of another, it must be siphoned into ours. Looking up at someone standing four inches higher on the podium tinges us green with envy, fists balled in frustration.
But that’s what makes us human. Otherwise, we’d all be carbon copies complete with snow white smiles and 1600 SAT scores.
I wasn’t willing to accept this for years. I still struggle now.
Even as I type this column, I’ve attacked my backspace button with a fervor, deleting line after line, just trying to accomplish an unachievable feat: perfection.
As a child, I felt that it was my duty to eliminate every flaw. Scrub my mistakes away until there was no trace residue of failure. Every eraser on the pencils in my bag reduced to a mound of shavings on the table, unusable.
I had no name for this feeling. It was just a sense that I had to.
It could have been a fear of disapproval. Fear of criticism. Fear that I wasn’t achieving my “greatest” potential.
But when I first laid eyes on the term “perfectionist” on some ad-riddled horoscope website about my Virgo star sign, everything clicked.
That was me — “a person who refuses to accept any standard short of perfection.”
And as it went, my brain required me to be painfully aware of every flaw in and around me, perfectionism included.
“She’s certainly a control freak.”
“What’s my problem?”
“That painting’s misaligned.”
As years tick by, my observation of flaws has shifted from seething criticism to an awkward embrace, shorts arms wrapped around a body towering several feet higher.
Because being perfect is not healthy — nor possible.
If you’re perfect, you can’t grow or change or adapt.
If you’re perfect, you’ve reached an unreachable peak of human existence.
If you’re perfect, you won’t appreciate all the other perfectly flawed people around you.
Flaws, the things we see as detriments to ourselves and society, have more merit than the failing grades we give them.
America would fall to pieces without Sunday night football and baseball park hotdogs. Both games built on the desire to one up each other and chest puffed pride.
Flight attendants repeatedly tell you to “put on your own oxygen mask before you aid others with theirs.”
That’s narcissistic — yet necessary.
Steve Jobs had a mania for control. But that’s what made him “bossy,” creating a company overflowing with trillions of dollars in wealth.
Rather than suffocate flaws behind a thin film of plastic wrap, we need to learn to welcome them into who we are. Who others are. What the world is.
It’s not about obsession. It’s embracing imperfection.
While I’ll never be rid of my perfectionism, I don’t let it take the wheel anymore. Instead, it’s the fuel for my motivation. My passion. My eagerness.
Because those flaws are what make us human.