What if Our Imperfections are Absolutely Perfect?

An exploration into the secret side of being creative

Have you ever felt there are too many sides inside of you? Have you ever felt you don’t fit in and the requirements to be so-called normal are impossible?

What if our imperfections are absolutely perfect?

For instances, there’s the quiet side who speaks softly and there’s the vicious side that can inhale the sun and spew fire if need be.

There’s the fearful side, likened to a fierce wild stray who sees others as the enemy. We might growl to keep someone away.

As for me, one minute I can speak rose and turn the petals into magic but push me too hard and I will scratch you with my thorns.

My creative side carries me in between here and there and sometimes, I can’t figure out how to return to zero.

So, I stay there. It’s usually a mystical space where candles burn upside down and clouds become the ground. I swim far and deep because I breathe better underwater than in the air.

Each hour of each day is different. The sides of me change as if I were in a fashion show.

But then there are days a mere glance can erode my confidence. And I limp back and change my mood to a whale of somber.

That’s how it feels when the world attacks us because we don’t fit the stereotype of perfectly proper.

Which by the way, really isn’t perfection but an illusion created to keep us off balance while we chase clearer skin, long to be taller or shorter, wanting hair colors that only Nature could wear if it had hair.

Society’s artificial flavors lacks logic. It goes around and around and LOVES to embrace the real craziness that we are all supposed to be the EXACT same and ignore how we truly are!

What a delight there’s multiplicity of lip size, hip size, hair textures. How we are naturally large, small, young, AND older.

Each of us deserves to be treated with fairness.

But what happens to the rose’s thorns and the sun that spewed fire?

Sometimes we get tired in a world that doesn’t shelter us from the caustic acid of microaggressions within the deadly intricate entrenched systems of — isms. “Isms” such as sexism and racism want us to be only ONE way.

I will go the other way. I won’t be defined by what hurts me.

Maybe it’s not so crazy that we have so many sides inside of ourselves. It’s how we survive until we can find shelter where it’s safe enough to let our guards down and explore the unfolding of our truer selves.

The sides that weep. The depressions that cripple us to the soft, sad, silence of the earth; we naturally bring ourselves closer to a Mother who cares.

The anxieties that are warning us there’s a lot to be anxious about.

Our intuition is naturally pulling us to listen to the subtle twitches.

We are like light switches. On and off with a dimmer installed to keep us safer when we need shelter from a world that creates too many man-made (often too white) storms of exclusiveness, when all we dream of is to be accepted and embraced for who we are.

Carl Jung summarizes it poignantly,

“Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.”

Carolyn Riker, MA, LMHC, is a licensed psychotherapist and author of three books of poetry and prose. Her latest is My Dear, Love Hasn’t Forgotten You. If you’d like, follow her on Facebook at Carolyn Riker, MA, LMHC or Instagram.