I was encouraged to write this, and it may come off as awkward and vulnerable, but I’m told it may help someone, so at the risk of oversharing, here goes…

I had become very comfortable in my imperfection. I had embraced my imperfections completely and loved them and laughed about them. I’ve spent decades on a spiritual path as a healer and that means you are taken on journey of self-discovery to self-mastery.

Because I am on a path that is now driving me to perfect myself, I am being made to face something that makes me very uncomfortable, and that is my fear of perfection. I know, right? Kind of funny.

All day long, we make mistakes. We are told to say, nobody’s perfect, brush it off, fix the mistake and move on. Kind of the norm.

I’m okay with perfecting the tasks that I do, in order to raise them to a level where they run smoothly and efficiently. I’m very comfortable with that. But, when someone scrutinizes me looking for perfection, I want to run the opposite direction.

Do I know why? Maybe. Some family dynamics are strange. I had a mother and sister that sabotaged and undermined me. Why? Jealousy. They plotted and set me up and when I fell face-first into a trap, they laughed at me. Then they gaslit me and told me I was the one who was at fault which made me the family scapegoat. The most I could do was be very careful about everything and to accept all my imperfections. I had to roll with all the punches. I left home on my 18th birthday and started a family of my own.

But what I’m facing now is a discomfort with success that kind of surprises me. It surprises me because it comes up in an odd way. I like seeing the success of my work for myself and quietly knowing what worked and what didn’t. But it scares me to be publicly recognized for it. I’m not sure I can put my finger on why. Perhaps it’s because I just haven’t experienced much of it and it feels completely foreign, therefore scary. Perhaps the roots lie in the past whenever I was awarded or complimented, there was a jealous backlash at home out of spite and jealousy. Not sure.

So, I just became very comfortable in imperfection. It was my safety zone to be not-perfect, living with a mother who was quick to point out imperfection. I was at my safest, running around barefoot outside playing and covered with a nice layer of dirt. Nobody paid much mind to the freespirit who spent most of her time out in nature. Like many, being connected to the Earth just felt natural.

How is it affecting me now? I think it’s coming up as a shadow that I’m having trouble getting my head around. Well, it could be a shadow, or it could be that the idea of experiencing success is completely foreign to me. The feeling is so foreign that it feels like a set up.

And maybe that’s why I’m supposed to share this. We’re going to go through some rough times, but we are going to come out of them, and when we do, we are going to need to heal and get used to experiencing good things, and that’s going to take some adjustment for all of us. The words I want to use are “trusting life again.”

I’m not perfect. I try hard and I put my heart and soul into it. I’m grateful for all the blessings in my life. I’m grateful to God for everything. I’m just me. I’m perfectly imperfect.

Edited to add: I was pointed to my post on Understanding Trauma through Polyvagal Theory That perhaps by writing this, I was helping myself to release stuck trauma energy surrounding the situation. I hope so. I do feel better, and I did have a big sigh release feeling like I was putting things to rest. I hope this helps someone to try just writing it out and letting it all go.