You're perfect. Don't change a thing.
Thoughts on what it means to be exactly enough
I went for a run yesterday morning. Ok, it was more of a slow jog. Ok, it was mostly walking. I have been trying to get up and get outside because apparently, sunlight is most beneficial before 10am. (So I learned from The Side Woo guest Chris Martin during our upcoming interview.)
But also, if I’m to be honest, I have been eating too many pastries and need to balance out the butter intake. I'm not super proud of my internalized fat shaming, but I am a woman in this complicated world, so there you have it.
Anyway, I was walking towards Market Street, and to my right there was a bench on which a man sat, lounging with his headphones on, the way that some people do here in San Francisco. As I walked past he yelled out at me: "You're perfect. Don't change a thing!" I looked over startled. For context, I was dressed in my pink patterned leggings, a pink hoodie, and a baseball hat. I gave him an awkward smile with a thumbs up. "Seriously!" He responded.
The way he said it was genuine, delivered from the universe to me through this nice man, enjoying his tunes.
As I said, it was early and I was in a bit of a grumpy morning mood, so I didn't run over and give him a hug. But on my way home I started to unpack what he said.
My first thought was a bit paranoid. Was that a backhanded compliment? Is that like telling someone they are “so brave” only to mean that they are making choices you wouldn’t make?
Or could he tell that I was feeling a little defeated and decided to give me a pick-me-up?
Or was it the ghosts of my ancestors speaking through him?
This idea of being perfect just as you are, similar to a famous line from one of my favorite movies of all time, Bridget Jones' Diary, has been simmering with me for hours. It is something I wanted to share with you, because if that’s true then you too are perfect just as you are. I don’t mean this to say that we all don’t need to evolve and roll with the punches of life, but rather that we are all pre-packaged in a perfect way to accept and receive the good things that life has to offer. And we are equipped to deal with the shitty things, even if we don’t want to.
For me, this concept offers me a sort of permission to pursue my wildest dreams, the dreams that are increasingly leading me in front of the camera to do interviews and teach classes, and hopefully will give me more of a platform for my artwork.
But this scares the shit out of me as someone who has spent 40 years hating her body and her face. (Again, I'm not super proud of that, but I am a woman in this complicated world. )
If this idea is to be believed, I am in fact totally enough and the right person for all these ideas that are swimming around my brain. If it is to be believed, I don’t need to lose weight or get a bunch (more) plastic surgery - unless I really want to. I don’t need to be happier or smarter. I just need to own my story and stay rooted in that.
Michelle Obama’s Becoming comes to mind when thinking about how to own your story, no matter how unsavory it is. In one anecdote from her time in grade school, she shares how she got in a fight and ended up punching a girl in the face. I have no memory of what caused the tussle, but the young girl crossed the not-yet-First Lady and got herself a bloody nose.
The fact that she had the courage to share such an unflattering story stuck with me. It was endearing and relatable in the context of her memoir, but I would have been mortified to tell anyone about such “bad” behavior. She didn’t try to pretend like she wasn’t someone who wouldn’t get pissed off on the playground, or gush with shame about it for the next two pages.
I think something about the fact that anger was the underlying emotion in this story felt significant to me as well. As a woman, it can be hard to show and own angry emotions (and I can imagine even more so as a black woman). I think it is one of the things that I am least proud of in myself and have as a result overcompensated with people-pleasing, which only forces the repressed feelings out sideways.
If we are in fact perfect, it means all our feelings are perfect and that rather than judge them we can look to them for information. What if being angry is the most natural response to a situation? I wonder how my life would have been different if I had been able to be less judgemental of my feelings and more open to hearing what they had to tell me.
For one, I would have quit things and people sooner instead of feeling bad for not enjoying them, like the intense fastpitch softball team I was on in high school, and my first two LTRs. I would have said no more often to jobs, to working with people, to hanging out with people who didn’t share my interests. I would have said yes more too probably, but just to different experiences, things that I was scared to try or scared that they were too much to hope for.
What about you?
This really spoke to me! I’ve been contemplating anger - and it strikes me that anger is to be honoured and is our friend. It has important things to say and seeks to protect us. Unfortunately, us woman all over the world are discouraged from expressing it in a bid to be liked/perceived as good. I wonder if there’s some sort of workbook/resource that can teach us how to access and sublimate our anger.
Love this, Sarah. I'd like to think that we are perfectly imperfect as we are, wonderfully unique in that way. We get to celebrate ourselves and still want to improve/evolve, change/grow. We are enough, and we can still want more from and for ourselves. We even get to be mad or disappointed in ourselves, and still love us. It's wonderfully fluid, and part of the fun of being human. I wonder if staying where we don't want to be or saying Yes instead of No is part of feeling "less than" or if it's the endless politeness that women are raised to have. (Don't want to rock any boats, right?) And I wish we could separate exercise from fat-shaming/diet culture. It feels good and is so good for us (physically, mentally, emotionally). I'll admit, if I have fries a couple of days in a row, I'll want to eat lighter and move more a day or so after, and not because I'm shaming myself. That delicious gloop of oil, salt and starch (which I love deeply and will never not have) is sitting in my guts, and those guts are asking for a bit of a break. It's good to listen to what our bodies tell us we need, especially if we've been having fun with what we want. It's balance, not punishment. No shame in that. xo