You are not perfect.

I’ve failed. Thats one of the hardest things for me to admit. Both out in the open, and even just to myself. The perfectionist boy inside me HATES that. He wants to freak out, hit the reset button on the Nintendo and do everything again perfectly. He wants to delete the past and pretend it didn’t happen.  But it did. And life stubbornly has no reset button, or save points to go back to.

I have to live with all the decisions I have made…0r, more applicably in my case, didn’t make.

As I come to the point of being able to sit with my imperfect, human self, and contemplate a large failure in my life, many other smaller failures come to mind to torment me as well.  I have learned that my job is to sit and make friends with these. Listen to the thoughts and learn the lessons they should’ve taught me at the time; the lessons the little boy couldn’t, or wouldn’t hear. 

Mostly, I’ve had to learn that there are parts of me that I didn’t want to look at, or accept….and that made them angry.  That gave them power behind the curtain.  Carl Jung said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”.  It is so tempting to use the fatalist scape goat. “The universe just hates me” “I’m cursed” etc.  It’s much harder to accept that you arrive at the place you are due to your own decisions and choices and actions. But I’m getting there.

BJJ shows this every, single, day.  Every Single roll.  Often multiple times a roll. You do X when it should’ve been Y. You zig when you shoulda zagged.  You roll into a choke instead of out of it.  You fail, all the time. Most of the time I am alright with that, but sometimes the frustration wells up quickly and that perfectionist little boy comes out. I might sulk. I might let my frustration show or go back at my training partner way harder (which NEVER works). I want to smash the Nintendo controller.  So Maybe I also need to think that there are parts of my “game” that I’m ignoring or not wanting to admit are shit and need work.  

Admitting weakness and failure is hard. Accepting that you are not, in fact, perfect and will NEVER be is probably the first step.  Doing the work to fix those weaknesses is even harder.

This needs to be balanced with the knowledge that it’s in fact ok to not be perfect, and that those imperfections are actually what make us who we are. 

But repeatedly banging your head into the same wall is harder than either of those. and just because familiar pain feels better than unfamiliar progress, thats no reason to stagnate.