I have spent the past four months in isolation. Not a single human interaction occurred ever since my plane landed. All I am left with are those stupid sheets of paper in front of me that I used to try to make sense of my blurry thoughts. Maybe one day a nice psychiatrist or a mortician will do a better job than me at analysing them.

 

“Dear mortician’s daughter who might happen to be a psychiatrist,

Sometimes my mind seems to be occupied by unimportant things. Today I counted that each flight of stairs in our building has sixteen stairs, and I made sure I started each flight with different foot. Yesterday I only had four and a half portions of my five-a-day, but that’s because I ate grapes which has significantly more fructose in it than other fruit, and I couldn’t mix kale with peppers to compensate... yeah, you get the gist. Imagine being trapped inside that for your whole life.

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Admittedly, I always get uncomfortable by a slightest imperfection, and the world that says everybody is perfect the way they are confuses me. People often call me a weirdo. But I always had a picture of perfection in my head, and I believed my hands were the ones that needed to put that image into action. It often further extends to that I often reject people around me who I find to be imperfect. I know people well enough to see through their flaws in almost an instant, and people who already are in my life don’t know how easy it is to lose me.

Maybe it’s all just a fear of the unknown. Because how are you supposed to strive for more, if you already accepted the less perfect version of yourself? I feel incompetence only in rare instances. And even when that happens, I make sure I go back to it, and practice until I become competent. Unfortunately, as much as I kept striving for perfection, I’m aware I’m far from perfect myself. On the contrary, thanks to my ability of great introspection, I am quite capable on reflecting on my slightest imperfection, pushing it into a downward spiral of overthinking, and twisting it around and around in my mind a million times until I find another mistake to reflect on. I always had to make sure I was irreplaceable in this world, that no one could do any job better than me. And sacrificing my social or love life for the sake of achieving it sounded reasonable to me.”

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In the past few months though, I felt like this “perfection” started to cost me. Not only did I become aware how unfair I was being to the people around me, but the world started being unfair towards me. The chaos in my head was getting bigger and bigger. On the nights that the exhaustion fought the insomnia, the nightmares fought their way to reach me.

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One fateful evening, a single scribble too many entered my mind. I suddenly felt overwhelmed. The thoughts, in my very sleep-deprived mind, processed the ideas in a less perfect way. With sadness in my teary eyes and weight on my chest, I decided to take a long soak in a lavender-salt scented bath. That didn’t help much to calm my nerves because I kept thinking about drowning. As I was combing through my long, brown hair, I reached out to scissors and started cutting my hair. Exerting a force on two metal blades and cutting the hair felt liberating. After a few rough chops, the left side of my hair hung wet and limp to just above my shoulders. I ran my fingers between the long strands on my right, that fell trailing into the water, and put down the scissors. “Now that my hair is asymmetric”, I thought, “the balance in the Universe has finally been established.” Because everything about me always had to be too perfect, this hairstyle was exactly what I needed. With a weird satisfaction as if I just managed to lift off a huge burden off me, I went to bed. The next morning, as anxiety woke me up from a long nap, but the feeling like I don’t care made me feel good. And in the days that followed, bringing a decision to try less to be perfect and simply accept the crazy, sometimes impulsive her (even with arguably the worst haircut in the Universe), felt natural. I used to be so blinded by the higher goals, as if the present, imperfect self is not the one who needs to pursue them.

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From this realisation on, I started practicing being imperfect, on purpose. Asking people favours I knew I wasn’t going to get. Submitting the work without spending three hours polishing and editing it. Telling people that I couldn’t right now. The silly, little everyday things. I realised I stopped being so fearful. I felt like I entered a whole new world. But not a “normal” kind of world; the new me created her own version, where she could be freer to express her humour or wear non-matching socks without the fear of what somebody might think.

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Then, as I was studying in a quiet section of the city’s public library one day, I had a thought. I’d spent my whole life having head stuck in the books. And people always used to complain I was weird! I’m sorry, but where was I supposed to learn about “normal”? How?! Who was supposed to teach me that? Surely not the mathematical equations. “Considering all the circumstances actually”, I thought, “I’m doing all right. I’m great in fact! Sure, call me a weirdo, call me a freak. But this freak is on a mission, and one day, this freak’s weird, antisocial mind will help making this world a better place. Normal doesn’t bring progress. Normal adjusts. Adjusted, in my world, meant being disadvantaged. I am who I am, and if this isn’t good enough for somebody, then I guess there isn’t much I want to do about it. My world is built of books and it’s wonderful, meet me there if you want to.”

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These experiences and internal monologues helped me accept myself. Soon enough though, as this overthinking nerd slowly got back into society, I realised I am too big of a narcissist to let go of my passion for perfection. It’s all I ever knew. I understood if I wasn’t so perfectionistic in the past, I wouldn’t have been where I am now. And I am proud of where I am. Letting go is hard, and maybe I’m still not ready to accept the possibility that perfect does not exist.

Perfect. Still not enough.