Recently, I've been running up against this word, a word that I hate so much it makes my blood boil, just hearing it. A concept that I feel like I'm constantly defying, pushing back against, trying to tear down. But trying to break through this idea, it's like going up against a wall: I can hit and punch and fight, but ultimately, the wall is still there and not any worse for the wear. The word is perfection. And everytime I hear it, it makes me want to scream.
Because we have this idea that perfection is something that we can attain, that we need to attain. The perfect body, the perfect partner, the perfect house, the perfect life. But we find in this life that we can never be skinny enough or pretty enough or rich enough or successful enough. There will always be someone on Facebook whose life looks more appealing than our own. When we seek our happiness from perfection, we talk about it like an earthquake, something that will just violently and suddenly happen to us, without warning, when all the conditions are just right. It is something that we have no control over, that is totally beyond our reach.
It leaves us afraid of the messy and the uncontrollable, the things that don't fit in the proverbial box that we have already decided must contain our whole life. Some of the things that won't fit are failure and uncertainty, ruining everything and looking like an idiot. I'm not sure about all of you, but I've encountered so much of these things in my life (and in myself) that I've had to expand my proverbial box to accommodate plenty of screw ups.
But where does this fear of failing come from? It is the nervousness of standing in front of the blackboard trying to do a math problem in front of the whole class (show your work!). It is the anxiety of giving a presentation at work, speaking before a group of people whose respect you value (In conclusion...). It is the excruciating decision of which words you will choose when you are talking to the someone who means everything to you and you want to pronounce one of those painfully simple yet painfully difficult phrases: I love you or I'm sorry.
I have seen it in students over the past three years as they try to tackle the Italian language, which is a struggle that I've personally been living along with them. At the beginning, there is always the fear that you will make a mistake, or say something wrong or look like an idiot. I want to tell them that if they keep working at it that they will stop making mistakes, stop saying things wrong and be perfect. But the fact is that in language learning as in life, you never stop making mistakes, you just learn that most of the mistakes ultimately don't matter: sometimes they're even funny, sometimes they're even useful. At a certain point, you accept imperfection as a fact of life and you get over it.
Recently, I've felt the need to remind myself to think of my life in the same terms.
Maybe it's especially because the last month has been overwhelming for me. Moving to a new city and starting a new job, coupled with all the usual general daily frustrations of being an expat, of being a foreigner has proven enough to drive me insane at moments. There are days when I feel like I can't do anything right! (Let me remind everyone once again to please be kind to the foreigners and stranieri in your life--we need all the help we can get!)
And all this has me asking myself how my life would be different had I chosen a different path, a different course, one with fewer rocks and pitfalls and places to stumble. I think all of us twenty-somethings have at one moment found ourselves scrolling through Facebook, comparing lives with our friends and thinking to ourselves in a moment of existential panic, has everything I've done up until this point been some kind of a terrible mistake? Am I wasting my life?
I think we're all looking for road signs here, for things to reassure us that we're headed in the right direction. We want the clarity, solid lines, definitions and borders that we took for granted growing up. But what nobody ever bothered to tell us in school or in college is precisely how messy life can be. It's less a peaceful stroll in the park and more one of those military-grade obstacle courses. With mud. Lots of mud. Did I mention that it's also raining? We'll reach the end eventually, but not without a lot of sliding, a lot of falling and a lot of pulling ourselves back up, even when we'd rather just throw in the towel.
Life isn't some kind of an equation that we solve, discovering at the end that x=42, as much as we would like it to be. Usually, I have found that x=? or x=some-imaginary-number or something equally frustratingly unfathomable. Although we want to see in black and white, reality is fraught with grey areas and ambiguity and moral dilemmas and paradoxes that we will never "solve," never reconcile with our beliefs or the world that we so desperately want to live in and it is for that reason that we will continue asking ourselves is this all some kind of terrible mistake??? If you're not asking yourself that question, maybe you just haven't thought about it enough.
But to be honest, I was never satisfied with answers that didn't lead to more questions and I've always thought that those people who claim to "have it all figured out" are either lying or terribly deluded. I'm learning to enjoy a good roll in the mud, or at least learning to have a good laugh about it afterward.
Being human, I will probably continue scrolling through Facebook and making comparisons when I shouldn't. I'll see friends who appear to be doing significantly better than me at taking a perfectly respectable path, doing better than me at having things like stable jobs and houses and spouses. And I'll wonder where that leaves me and whether or not I'll eventually find the right way, the perfect way.
But then I'll remind myself that there is no manual on how to do this, no surefire 100% money-back guaranteed guide to perfection. At the end of the day, we're all playing by ear, making it up as we go along. My choices constitute as valid an attempt as any and so do yours and yours and yours.
Will we ever find our way?
Maybe there is no right way.
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