-- Riya Gautam
“You’re literally perfect. You can do literally everything. Why in the world are you sad?”
Those are the exact lines one of my best friends yelled at me recently that haven’t got out of my head since. The word perfect in itself sounds exactly like what it means- something that can’t have errors, something that is so flawless that it’s as good as it can be, as desirable as it can possibly be and needless to say, I’m far from that. I’ve never been perfect, and I no longer want to be frankly. There’s always something we lack, something we can’t achieve or someone we can’t be. In search of this supposed missing puzzle piece, that will, in theory at least make us complete, we lose track of the things we’ve actually achieved, the things we’ve overcome to be where we are today.
‘It takes courage to grow up to be who you truly are.’ – E. E. Cummings
Cummings couldn’t have been more accurate with these words. It takes immeasurable courage, strength and resilience to get up each day, get your act together and get through the day. We don’t give ourselves nearly enough credit for it. I know you’ve all heard the self-love pep talk so I’m not going to do that. Yes, it’s important to “love” ourselves, but love here doesn’t refer to having a sense of superiority or condescension, but simply acknowledging that each of us have our own journeys, which can’t be remotely compared even if they seem similar. We never know what the person in front of us is going through, and trust me, we can never get the idea by merely looking at them because in today’s times, when everyone wants to be “perfect”, it is apparently embarrassing to struggle or to not be our best versions at all times, which ideally is and should be accepted as an okay situation.
As for me, all I ever wanted as a kid to be was ‘normal’- not something people aspire to be. I wasn’t an outcast or anything, but I was somehow perennially sick. I barely remember my grade nursery to be honest, since I hardly ever attended school and was hospitalised and sick for a large part of that year. All I recall when I think of school during that time is my parents getting get well soon cards made by my friends and teachers. Once I thought I recovered and started going back to school, I used to feel sick mid-day and throwing up daily in the washroom became a ritual, which almost everyone was aware of. The nausea used to overpower everything else (not really the ideal happy jolly pre-school experience any kid dreams of).
I slowly got better but was never really a morning person- thanks to the morning sickness which perpetuated till a solid 10 years. I used to miss my bus every single day, I mean it, every single day in the morning, and used to reach school late. Never got the morning playtime that we got before our classes in younger grades, which even though was a very sad situation for a 5-year-old, wasn’t the least of my problem. You see, I used to be a very shy girl, seeing me now, you would think it’s some idiotic joke, but it wasn’t. My neighbours waving me a hello would induce the need to cry and it wasn’t something I could fight, no matter how hard I tried. Despite all this, I was an active kid scoring the top of my class, giving speeches in 102 fever for school events and competitions ever since I was a toddler.
Now, sadly, we no longer have many people rooting for others with mostly everyone just wishing for our downfall which was precisely what happened with me. Jealousy and hatred creeped in with other girls talking crap about me behind my back. Things got little better health wise with time, but there was always this one person in my class, every new one a bigger version of the previous one, who hated me with all their heart when all I ever wanted was to be friends. The bullying got worse when teachers got involved. Now playing favourites is normal, a teacher harassing a student online and in class, and then getting them to do all the work too, however isn’t really justified.
In the middle of all this, just post covid when I finally had a friend circle I genuinely loved with people who genuinely liked and cared about each other, we shifted. Once we did, in one year I lost the person closest to me, one of my family members had to have a number of emergency surgeries, and now the teacher-kid bullying involved a parent who put up false complaints, making my life living hell in the school. Making friends, given the circumstances was an uphill battle. I was literally living on the edge, till we shifted again a year later. Now this new school was initially really fun, the sort I longed for the past whole year, but slowly and gradually the masks started falling and people started showing their true colours, which weren’t always bright.
A year later, here I am, surprised that I made it, balancing all my innumerable hobbies with pretty decent grades, amazing friends and at the fact that I actually grew up to be the girl who has the courage I never thought I could have, with the outgoing confident personality which was all I wanted to ever accomplish as a 4-year-old. Yes, things have been hard, and no matter how many times I hear the word perfect attributed to me daily, it stings like salt on raw wounds because I know a girl lying in bed at 2 AM scratching and peeling off her skin till it bleeds because even she feels anxious is not perfect; but the world doesn’t see anything under the surface, maybe as they shouldn’t. After all, who is it that we’re trying to prove ourselves to if not our younger self? But at the same time, what if I am not just ‘not-perfect’ but also just another idiotic teen who can’t get her head in place? What if I bounce back to the cowardly person I used to be? If everyone knew about how much I struggle daily, would they see me any differently?
Below is the poem I wrote earlier that shows some part of what the seemingly ‘perfect girl’ and ‘any teachers dream student’ feels.
People tell me am I too much to handle, and somehow never enough for them to keep;
always the brightest candle-the first to get exhausted, it's bittersweet.
I'm too kind to be mean, but still classified as rude.
Sometimes I want to scream, if only you could see it from my side of the screen.
I have the best of intentions, yet seem to mess things up along the way.
Sometimes you just have to be there, there to tell me it's going to be okay.
I promise, I'll be your biggest supporter even in the darkest of dark,
If you promise to have a little empathy and don't extinguish my internal spark.
Humans are simple creatures with complex emotions, and it is indeed bittersweet;
because it's only as complicated as we let it be.
You see, while writing this very poem, it actually hit me as I penned down the words- “It’s only as complicated as we let it be.” What if things did not have to perpetually be so messed up? What if the controls truly are in our own heads? What if we stopped pretending, starting being kind universally to everyone, irrespective of whether we know their story or not, but for the sake of the mere fact that humans were called so, because they were humane. Maybe we should actually start realising we are always living some of our earlier dreams; that we have our own unique path that shouldn’t be compared to anyone else’s and that focusing on being above the crowd shouldn’t be the motive, making our younger self proud should. What if we didn’t feel the need to chase perfection which is no more than a mirage in a desert that blurs as soon as you start closing in toward it? And finally, what if perfection in itself is flawed? Yes, what if the very word that means flawless is itself fundamentally flawed in its entirety?
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