The worst thing we can do is hide our flaws, yet we do this in the name of perfection. I talked with an artist who was too afraid to post his work on Instagram because it wasn’t professional enough. They were little doodles that he was drawing while killing time at a bar. I thought the doodle was fun, but he felt it wasn’t perfect for public consumption.

Edited Perfection

I believe that’s the issue with public consumption. We only see the highlights of just about anything. We see a movie’s end product when the bloopers make the movie as good as it was. As a result, we are taught to be as perfect as something that’s gone through editing. “Never let them see you sweat.” However, when someone perceives themselves as overconfident, it’s easy to tell that one is faking it to make it.

We are not who we are if we are trying. Simply being doesn’t require effort. When it comes to being inexperienced in something we believe we’re supposed to be experienced in, effort takes precedence. Fake it to you make it can also be rephrased as try hard until it comes naturally and you don’t have to try anymore. Most of us take on this advice, and when we try hard at something that doesn’t come naturally to us, we can easily sniff it out.

Some may perceive confidence in a set of skills we have no experience in as competence. To others, it reeks of insecurity. This is not to say that learning a new skill isn’t important. That’s not the issue at all because life is education. It’s pretending we know the book’s ending when we’ve barely cracked it open. Believing we know it all when we know nothing keeps us stuck on Chapter 1, when others may depend on us to understand the plot.

Adulting

As a result, adulting is typically defined by busyness—most of the things we do serve no purpose. Back when I was struggling mentally, one of my previous supervisors pretty much shamed me for not having my life together in my 30s. She might have been 20 years older than me, and I wondered if she had her life together. We tend to pretend that we do as we pretend to be experts about other people’s lives. I’m not immune to this judgment, but life would be much better if we knew that no one’s perfect.

Connection Through Imperfection

I’ve come to learn that true maturity means taking responsibility for ourselves. This means what we are good at as well as our flaws. The paradox with accepting our flaws is that we start to live more authentically. There’s no fear in believing we will be exposed to what we don’t know one day. From my experience, people generally accept once we’ve laid out expectations of our inadequacies in the forefront. It’s once someone believes a certain thing that isn’t true. Trust is broken. The rejection we sought not to encounter eventually happens because your “make it” didn’t align with the time it took to get exposed.

Sharing one’s experience allows connection, as the person we share this with gets the opportunity to teach. Once we stop pretending, we can start authentically connecting, knowing that I will never be 100%, but I can ask for the percentages I’m missing from other people who have what I don’t. Embracing our imperfections then gives room for others to do the same.

Questions and Responses