Growing up in high school, my best friend always seemed perfect to me. She is like a goddess, beautiful and with an amazing fit body, good at everything she does, all the boys love her. It might sound like an envious feeling but it actually isn’t, I love her and wish nothing but the best to her, but I did feel like I was never going to be not even a bit as beautiful as her.
I felt like her shadow sometimes. When we would go out, lines of boys chased her, and I wasn’t noticed by anyone. She is like one of those Instagram models with thousands of likes that show up on my news feed everyday, while most of my likes are from my mom. I assumed that she was perfect, that all the things in her life were perfect, that nothing ever went wrong for her and all she had were happy days. That kind of perfection was something that to me, I could never achieve, and it hurt me more than I wanted to.
But the years went by, we grew up, and as life became more complex and our relationship became closer, I realized: she was dealing with her own demons too. She thought she wasn’t as good as someone else, as pretty as someone else, as funny as someone else. All the insecurities I had when I compared myself to her, she had with others.
So I understood. All of these things I’m about to say might sound like a great cliché, but as much as a cliché it is, we constantly need to be reminded of this: Perfection doesn’t exist. Everything we see (on social media, on TV, and even with people we know and look up to) is not as it seems, and everyone is dealing with their own demons.
That is an encouragement to not only be nicer to ourselves, and know that there might be someone out there feeling we are perfection when we actually have our own stuff to deal with, but also an encouragement to be nicer to others. Maybe, and although it might seem little to us (when my friend tells me “I look awful in this outfit” I cannot believe she is thinking such a thing), other people are having a hard time and they just try to hide it.
And know that we are perfect in the way we are. That our little mistakes and things we might not like about ourselves, might be things that others could want to have. I complain a lot about things in myself (that I’m too tall or too big, for example) that others wish they had. Maybe the meaning of perfection is imperfection, is being happy with the way they are. I work very hard every day to be happy with myself, and I truly hope everyone finds time and energy to do the same
