What happens when we stop waiting for everything to be perfect?
The finished salsa.
I had a decision to make.
It was late Tuesday night, and I still hadn’t finished writing this blog post.
Monday had been a long day—an appointment in Kansas City, lunch with my mom, taking John to get ingredients for salsa, and choir practice that evening. By the time I got home, there wasn’t enough time or energy left to write.
Tuesday morning, I started working on the post after my two morning Zooms while John was making guacamole and then salsa. We both had massages that afternoon, and the horses had their feet trimmed.
John had overworked his shoulder, which was why he had needed the doctor’s appointment on Monday. With help from a friend, I got the salsa into jars and made enchiladas for dinner.
We finally ate around 10 p.m.
The blog still wasn’t finished.
And there was a sink full of dirty dishes.
I could stay up late and finish the blog, wash the dishes, and get everything back in order.
Or I could go to bed, get some rest, and be ready for the long day ahead on Wednesday.
I chose sleep.
I left the dishes in the sink. They are still there.
And you know what?
They’ll get washed.
I chose self-care.
For someone who has spent much of her life trying to get things right, that choice was significant.
The problem with perfect
A composite of three photos that I made when I was first learning PhotoShop.
Perfectionism has been a lifelong companion.
I’ve gotten better at recognizing it. I’ve learned to give myself more grace. Still, there are times when that old voice shows up and tells me something isn’t ready yet.
It needs more work.
It could be better.
Maybe I should wait.
Sometimes perfectionism disguises itself as high standards. Sometimes it looks like being responsible. Sometimes it looks like care.
And sometimes it keeps us from putting anything out into the world at all.
I used to design newsletters, and I remember how hard I was on myself when I noticed an imperfection after something had gone to print. I would focus on the mistake instead of seeing the entire piece.
I can still spot those things.
The difference is that I’m much more likely to let them go.
I rarely go back and correct a typo on my blog once it’s published. I give myself the same grace I would give someone else if I noticed a small mistake in their writing.
I don’t pretend it isn’t there.
I simply recognize that it doesn’t need to define the whole thing.
When we’re waiting for perfect
I learned something similar when I was designing for clients.
There were times when someone would come in to look at a project I was working on, and I would be thinking about everything that still needed to be done.
They would look at it and say, “This is perfect.”
I could see the flaws.
They could see the finished product.
That experience taught me something important: we often see imperfections in our own work that other people never notice.
We can spend so much time searching for the crack that we miss the beauty of the whole.
My oldest son gave me another perspective on this.
When he was in middle school, he had to attend summer school for math. It wasn’t because he struggled with math. He was brilliant at it.
The problem was that the course was self-paced, and he didn’t want to turn in a test unless it was perfect.
He had fallen at least a quarter behind.
Years later, he took a self-paced geometry course as a sophomore in high school and finished an entire semester in one day.
The difference wasn’t his ability.
It was what happened when perfectionism wasn’t holding him back.
That’s how the light gets in
There’s a line from Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem that has stayed with me:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
I love that.
As a recovering perfectionist, I find something deeply freeing in those words.
The crack doesn’t mean the whole thing is broken.
The imperfection doesn’t erase the beauty.
The unfinished part doesn’t mean we have failed.
Sometimes the crack is exactly where something new can enter.
The light.
A new perspective.
A little more freedom.
A willingness to say, “This is good enough.”
What are you waiting to make perfect?
Perfectionism can be especially complicated for caregivers.
When someone depends on you, there can be enormous pressure to get everything right. The right appointment. The right medication. The right decision. The right words. The right response.
You may feel as though there is no room for mistakes.
There may be days when you can’t even remember what you wanted before caregiving became such a large part of your life.
You may keep waiting for the right time to rest, create, reconnect, or rediscover yourself.
You may even believe you need to have everything figured out before you can begin.
You don’t.
You can leave the dishes in the sink.
You can recline in the middle of the mess and take a breath.
You can leave something imperfect.
You can put down the expectations and old definitions of who you are and ask yourself what still matters to you.
You can stop pretending you have to have all the answers.
And you can notice where the light is already getting in.
That is part of what Discover the Kaleidoscope Within is about—looking at the pieces of your life from a different perspective and discovering that there may be more possibilities, more color, and more of you still waiting to be seen.
You don’t have to become a perfect version of yourself.
You get to discover yourself.
Cracks included.
And sometimes, “good enough” is more than enough.
It’s the place where the light gets in.
A question for you
Where are you holding yourself to a standard of perfection that you would never expect from someone else?
What might become possible if you gave yourself permission to let “good enough” be enough?
If you’re a caregiver who has lost touch with yourself somewhere along the way, I’d love to talk with you about what might be waiting to emerge.
Click the button below to schedule a Zoom with me.
Every story needs a soundtrack.
This is the one I’ve chosen for this post—sometimes because of the title, sometimes the lyrics, sometimes simply the feeling it stirs in me.
