Broken

I watched a programme on Plastic Surgery Gone Horribly Wrong awhile ago. As I winced and cringed at pictures of horribly disfigured, grotesquely ugly people, I wondered again why anyone in their right minds would take their perfectly acceptable bodies and turn them into the stuff of nightmares.

Video after video... huge breasts that looked as if they would fall off anytime, bloated lips twisted into permanently seductive half smiles, wrinkle-free faces that never seemed to move... What on earth were they thinking???????

I got my answer in the words of a surgeon.

"People cannot stand the thought of being less than perfect. Wrinkles, funny noses, tiny breasts, excess fat... Ironically, in their quest to have perfect bodies, they forget that it is those very imperfections which make us attractive and appealing."

You know, it's easy to get so obssessed with achieving perfection that we all miss the beauty of imperfection. Imperfection is beautiful because it creates a feeling of "real-ness" in the people we know. How many of us know someone who seems to have everything together and feel extremely intimidated by them? We may admire them and strive to be like them, but there's always this naughty thought in our minds that they aren't quite human, and oh my goodness, isn't it sickening having to be that "in control" all the time? The perfect people of this world- the ones who make us envious and suspicious- always seem untouchable, robotic, immune, forever surrounded by a vague haze which protects them from the mess-ups of the rest of the world.

But the even worse thing about perfection is how trapped it makes us feel. I think Christians especially fall into this rut, because, hey, doesn't the Bible say we're supposed to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect? And so, because we unconsciously equate being saved with being perfect, we struggle and drown in the sins which never seem to disappear, always unwilling and afraid to ask for help, because who would love us anymore if they knew what we were really like?

Perfection can turn pretty quickly from a good motivating force into a suffocating noose that demands we go around wearing smiling masks and being cheerfully sociable and having pleasing personalities and looking the right way and wearing the right things. And this drug can be so addictive that in the quest to be completely perfect, we lose touch with our souls, those very imperfect, insecure, even appalling parts of us that make us human. And then we turn into "things" that can never connect with anyone on a deep level, because we've forgotten what it's like to struggle, and fail, and sin, and we've forgotten what it's like to empathise with that.

We all know where this leads, of course. Like the dissatisfied seekers who thought perfection was to be found in a body which met every acceptable criteria of beauty, we find that trying to have it all means we often lose it all at the end of the day. Like Bree in "Desperate Housewives", our carefully-crafted worlds where everything goes like clockwork, crumble and fall and slowly disappear before our eyes, because...

Perfection wasn't meant to be found this side of heaven.

And never embracing this truth means that a lot of us perfectionists will miss out on the quirks and flaws and annoying traits that ultimately make the people we love endearingly real.

"This is me
In all my gory glory
I bet you didn't see it coming
Tell me, now, what you're really thinking."