Status Updates From Being Perfect

I adore Anna Quindlen's writing. This book offers wonderful reminders to us all

"The perfect student can never step outside the safe box of the right answer, can never take a flyer on the honorable failure that may be more compelling than the safe paper that gets an A."

There is a section in one of my favorite bookstores in RVA called "Secret Book Date" where you pick a wrapped book based only on a sentence long tag-line. This one was "I think you're perfect & I'm just the right size to carry around so that I can tell you that forever and always". Such a short but sweet dialogue about finding personal happiness above outward perfection (which is something I struggle with).

"... you will be able to teach them by example not to be terrorised by the narrow and parsimonious expectations of the world, a world that often likes to colour within the lines when a spray of paint, a scribble of crayon, would be much more satisfying."

"Being a good parent is not generational, it is deeply personal, and it all comes down to this: if you can bring to your children the self that you truly are, as opposed to some amalgam of manners and mannerisms, expectations and fears that you have acquired as a carapace along the way... (cont'd)

"I can tell you that by the end of a day of trying to be perfect I was always as exhausted as if I'd done the whole thing at a fast clip in running shoes. There's some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn't let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all."

"Begin with that most frightening of all things, a clean slate. And then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: Because they are what I want, or wish for. Because they reflect who and what I am."

"But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great, ever came out of imitations. What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."

"Trying to be perfect may be inevitable for people who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. But at one level it's too hard, and at another, it's too cheap and easy. Because all it really requires of you, mainly, is to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be and to assume the masks necessary to be the best at whatever the zeitgeist dictates or requires."

"Eventually being perfect became like carrying a backpack filled with bricks every single day. And oh, how I wanted to lay that burden down."