How to be perfectly imperfect

Don’t let perfection be the enemy of a healthy and happy 2018. Instead, anti-guru and bestselling author Sarah Knight suggests we make this the year to get stuff wrong

Sarah Knight on why 2018 should be your year to embrace getting it wrong

As a recovering perfectionist, I speak from experience when I say: you need to cut yourself some slack. Or, someday, you’re likely to ruin Christmas. Barely a term into my first year of university, I got sick. It started as a common cold and grew into a sinus infection. Despite my burning forehead and throbbing glands, I soldiered on, showing up for every class, doing all the reading and turning my papers in on time. I was convinced that if I pushed harder and longer and deeper into my own personal plague, I would emerge on the other side with perfect marks at one of the country’s premier universities, just like I had at my tiny high school in my tiny home town. (That may have been the fever talking.)

So I kept pushing. I set my alarm for early morning and studied late into the night. And I got sicker and sicker.

Within a couple of weeks, I was flat on my back in my single dormitory bed with a golf ball-sized lump in my neck, my new college friends stopping by with cheap orange juice and worried looks in their eyes. I fell behind in my work and saw those perfect marks slipping away, which helped neither my mental state nor my physical one.

I went home for the holiday break, where I lay on my back some more until I felt well enough to rejoin the living. (My relatives had to pretend they weren’t looking at my neck bulge. It wasn’t pretty.) a break – until your body stages a feverish, mucus-filled revolt – is nobody’s idea of a joyeux Noël.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take that lesson to heart until much more recently.

For a long time – more than 30 years, in fact – I pursued perfection like storm chasers pursue tornadoes, heedless of the risks to my own wellbeing. As illustrated by the previous anecdote, this is an imperfect way to live.

It’s also pointless.

First, because it’s so damn hard to achieve true perfection anyway. You can study, strive and develop a goiter, an ulcer, a migraine, or a rosy ribbon of hives across your mid-section, but none of that necessarily ensures that you’ll manage to do the thing you’re suffering for ‘perfectly’.

Did I get all of those perfect marks

I was after? Of course not. That was never a realistic goal. Even an Olympic gymnast who dedicates their life to scoring a fabled perfect 10 is unlikely to get one. So where does that leave the rest of us? (Hive-ridden and self-flagellating with a tube of cortisone cream, probably.)

This trend continued into my working life. As a book editor, it was my job to find authors’ mistakes and correct them. But I never found them all. Inevitably, a book I’d been slaving over for two or three years would arrive on the shelves, and the emails from well-meaning readers who “just wanted to make sure we knew about that typo on page 110” would arrive in my inbox. Each one felt like a gross personal failure, and added another hive to my growing collection.

Beyond that, a yen for overachieving set me up for a double burn when I underperformed. For every exam I did manage to ace, or book I sent into the world mistakefree, there were three more that left me lying awake at night, cataloguing my failures like a farmer assessing

“For a long time I pursued PERFECTION like storm chasers PURSUE tornadoes”

a flock of substandard sheep. As I said before, that’s no way to live.

Alter expectations

Although I may be an extreme case of ‘natural-born’ perfectionist, we’re all under the same cultural attack, perpetuated by formidable outside forces like capitalism, the media and Instagram.

Brides, for example, are subjected to constant pressure to achieve the perfect wedding, the perfect body or the perfect roast chicken to impress their in-laws. But, inevitably, the florist will bungle the order, the monthly bloat will win out and the oven will be too hot. What then?

I’ll tell you what: disappointment, shame, anxiety and dry chicken.

And that outcome isn’t limited to once-in-a-lifetime pressures like weddings. Headlines touting ‘perfect’ abs and bikini bodies are omnipresent. Women are confronted daily by advertisements showing ‘perfect’ families that seem to outpace their own in terms of tidiness, healthy eating and hygiene. Even the challenge of finding the ‘perfect’ gift for someone you love can feel like a struggle rather than a fun afternoon of shopping.

Whether in school, at work or in relationships, there are no winners in the race toward perfection – just a lot of people who did everything as best they could and still usually wish they’d achieved better results.

And that’s mostly because society says they could have or should have done better.

Well, short of moving to a deserted island with no wi-fi or phone signal, you’re unlikely to escape those formidable outside forces I mentioned. Which means it’s up to you to break the cycle for yourself.

You can start by making 2018 your year of imperfection: applauding your efforts instead of decrying your results; accepting yourself for who you are, not who you – or other people – think you’re supposed to be. And instead of working toward an impossible standard, work toward happiness. (Which is a better outcome anyway.)

Rethink your flaws

It may sound daunting but eschewing perfection and the pressures thereof is actually fairly easy with a practice that I call ‘mental redecorating’ – which is basically feng shui with a side of ‘F**k that sh*t!’

Mental redecorating is all about identifying your flaws and then refreshing the way you look at or deal with them. Like its ancient Chinese cousin, it helps you take things that are working against you and reorient them so they work for you – without much effort at all. You could be one of those women I mentioned, struggling not only to manage your own home and work life but the lives of your partner and kids.

The emotional labour of parenting is hard enough without doing any of it ‘perfectly’. If you’re feeling overwhelmed (and, consequently, like a failure), the flaw in this scenario is not that you’re not up to the task(s); it’s that there are far too many of them for one person to realistically handle. And if the root cause is too many family members creating too many to-do items, use their numbers to your advantage and ask them to pitch in. Rather than martyr yourself to the cause, recruit reinforcements. (I mean, I folded laundry when I was seven years old; surely your kids can do it, too.)

Be authentic

Let’s say that you’re slightly obsessed with projecting a ‘perfect’ life on social media. It’s understandable – being bombarded with filtered, cropped, cleverly captioned images of everybody else’s lives (including celebrities with personal trainers and make-up artists and nannies on call) is liable to create a complex in even the most easy-going Instagrammer.

But there are two sides to every aspirational coin: perfect and relatable. If you care about amassing likes and followers, you stand to gather just as many – if not more – by sharing, commiserating and joking about your imperfect life. Authenticity is charming! Plus, it’ll save you time and energy agonising over the best angles.

Finally, perhaps you love to entertain but hate feeling deflated like a prematurely collapsed soufflé when your meals don’t match up to the light, fluffy, melt-in-themouth ideal? Don’t let that discourage you from hosting supper parties in 2018. Embrace your strengths – even if it’s just one signature dish – and spend this year discovering the best pre-made desserts your local deli has to offer. The goal is to have fun and send your friends home sated.

So what if you’re not much of a baker? The most delicious peanut butter cookie I’ve ever tasted comes wrapped in cellophane from a grocery store in Brooklyn.

Perfection is a myth. Chasing it will leave you depleted and, more often than not, disappointed.

Accepting your imperfections and working around them is a much more productive use of your time and energy. And if you can ‘perfect’ that skill, you’ll be in mighty good shape by the time next Christmas rolls around. I know I will.

You Do You: how to be who you are and use what you’ve got to get what you want (Quercus, £12.99)

“Instead of working toward an IMPOSSIBLE standard, work toward HAPPINESS”