Perhaps perfection is an avoidance of being fully seen. A rejection of life, aliveness, the mystery, truly an aspect of Thanatos, the embodiment of death. Perfectionism is sterile, it sucks dry life’s juicy unknown. The dark feminine. There is a tightness around the somatic experience of striving for perfection, a very tine line to walk, a very small box to inhabit. What surrounds the narrow scope of perfection's gaze, is a belief deep down stuck on repeat, that parrots, "I am not enough as I am." This belief becomes the fertile ground for judgement, competition, and comparison and underneath it all is a grief stricken child who longs for unconditional love.
There is no freedom in her perfect little box, just a hamster spinning on a wheel. Who created this box? Perhaps it is like a family heirloom, passed down through many generations, only to land in her hands. Perhaps it is the patriarchy that she was born into. A social system that systematically devalues her, fears her darkness, her wildness, her power.
Striving for perfection is what keeps her slave to the capitalist regime.
Commodified we are. Bodies bought and sold, forgetting they house souls. Yet no matter how much is bought and sold, there will never be enough to satiate the hunger of perfection. We are being fed a lie, "perfection" does not exist here, not on this earthly plane.
Yet, we live in a culture ruled by the toxic masculine, a culture that promotes and demands the impossibility of perfection, inject that there, nip and tuck this here, maybe then I will be enough. We live under a hypnosis that convinces us that we must constantly improve who we are. What if we all, in this moment hopped off the hamster wheel and saw our own power and wholeness? What a rebellion! I would imagine that capitalism as we know it would collapse.
There is an incredible well of emptiness underneath this addiction, underneath this insatiable hunger. An emptiness that can only be filled by spirit, soul. Fear is its fuel. There will never be enough accomplishment, enough beauty, enough control, enough talent to fill that empty space.
Striving for impossible perfection is what causes us to starve ourselves and slit our wrists. Driving us toward a perfection that exists only in death, the afterlife.
Let us remember the beauty in aliveness. It is in the imperfections that our uniqueness lives, our one of a kind flavor. No, you do not need to be perfect in order to be lovable, it is quite to the contrary, it is in your imperfections that there is space for love to blossom.
Article Written for Channel the Sun Magazine