One of society�s definitions of perfect is �being without fault or defect�. How much has that definition influenced my own personal definition of that ubiquitous idea. With the entertainment and media explosion of the past two decades, �Perfection� has become profitable, quite and the pursuit of it passes as popular entertainment.
There are actually programs on television where people who are �ugly� get picked to go under the knife for multiple cosmetic surgery procedures so that, by the end of the hour-long show, they are �acceptably pretty� to the world. Thank God! I would really feel inconvenienced to be offended by someone�s crooked nose or small tits. Cosmetic surgery I am not necessarily offended by, but people�s desires to achieve a cultural ideal rooted in old and stagnant soil I am. Really I think those who do are ignorant of their own inherent beauty, both spiritually and physically.
There is fine in everyone. As I walk over the cement of the city, I see so much human detritus, literally kicked to the outermost borders of civilization by our defectless-obsessed society, deemed not pretty because of their scars.
They are more interesting than anything deemed flawless. It wounded me when I read that Eleanor Roosevelt, who apparently was an incredible and intelligent person, said later in her life when asked if she had any regrets, she said she did.
She wished she had been prettier. Why wasn�t she pretty? How did she come to that agreement with herself? I am unpretty and it is important. There are countless ways we learn what it is to be socially acceptable. There are messages so loud that they seem to make us deaf, screaming in our ear, seemingly desensitizing us to their message: �You are no good!�
The message has already been delivered, immediately sinking into that composite mire of countless quite ways hardwired into our collective semi-unconsciousness to berate ourselves with constantly insulting our Worth. I have been obsessed with it all, too. When I was a child I would draw hideous visages and then whittle their profiles down to an image of what I had learned was beauty. Still, I mourned their originality and found what remained uninteresting when compared to the bulbous foreheads and distended cleft chins that had occupied the same space on the page before.
I�ve lived it all. Becoming downhearted when my hair became thin early in my twenties or I went through a depression and gained weight. In those moments I was unintentionally and without awareness, trodding all over my Worth. First, I did not understand completely that what I looked like had nothing to do with my Worth, nor did trying to attain a cultural ideal rooted in fear and boredom. Second, I was miserable because of the latter. Who can recognize their worth at that point, having in ignorance blighted out all sight of it? Eventually I heard the compassionate whispering of the Universe calling me to my Soul. �Come back,� it said. �Be who you were meant to be�� At some time, each one of us will finally listen and remember who we are, coming into alignment with our Souls and our Worth, achieving �the highest degree of excellence�, which oddly is one of the definitions I find in my dictionary for �Perfection�.