I looked over at Shaune and winked.
I’d heated up some of Captain Highliner’s breaded cod fillets, frozen peas, corn and oven baked some French fries. Lately it’s what meals I’m responsible for look like. And today at the gym, I lasted 30 minutes on the treadmill when winded I gave up and hit the showers.
I’ve been thinking about the rhythm of my days, about how unless I’m performing at some unrealistically high echelon, I never quite feel good enough. But the reality is that those high performance days are very few and far between. Most of the time I’m moving along the best I can at a low to mediocre level, doing okay in some areas, coming close to failing in others.
I‘d never considered that I might have some perfectionist tendencies. That I could only pat myself on the back when I measured up to these imaginary benchmarks I’d set. No wonder I walk around all day feeling like I need something more, that happiness is just out of my reach.
I do understand that this is the human condition; I get that most of us operate from this model. Brené Brown in her book The Gifts of Imperfection talks about wholehearted living:
It means cultivating courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.
I discovered her work several months ago through my beautiful bloggy friend Gerri who posted this Ted talk. And because the universe was trying to get my attention, a few months later when I asked another of my blog buddies who happens to be a psychologist for a book recommendation that addressed shame, she pointed me to the same Ted talk and Brown’s books.
When you need to learn some of LIFE's lessons, it's amazing the lengths to which IT will go to make sure you do.
