It's ok not to be ok.

Love is louder than the pressure to be perfect.

I used to be a firm believer that all mistakes were a matter of poor judgment, ignorance or a lack of focus and can be 100% avoided. The way i saw it, a lack of mistakes equaled  perfection and , so there was no way in the world I believed that perfection was an unattainable  goal. Whenever i would make a mistake simply out of ignorance i would scold myself for not knowing better. I was on a constant quest for knowledge and information as to never make mistakes in an effort to retain as much perfection as humanly possible. I took this mentality with me into every avenue of my life and It wasn't until I was curled up, bedside in a suicidal heap of a mess that I realized this mentality was killing me. literally. 

A couple days ago my debit card vanished into thin air. No guys, i didn't "lose" it, it really vanished. (Believe it or not the same thing happened to my keys dec '11. They have yet to be recovered) After retracing my steps between my car in the driveway to the 10ft walk to my front door, a couple hundred times, I gave up the search and assumed it was in the disappearing black hole that reappears every so often to consume my valuables. This mistake, according to my mother was 100% avoidable. As she listed things i SHOULD have done to avoid making such an error, I mentally listed all the things I DID do to avoid such an  error, and although our lists matched up perfectly, the card was still lost.

In those moments I realized one thing that changed my life: "Nobody is perfect, mistakes WILL BE made, you can't avoid them."

Ground breaking right? I mean that's kind of like a DUH type moment. At least for normal people.(unlike myself)

In those moments I realized I am not perfect and while the pressure to BE perfect is always gonna be coming from SOMEWHERE I don't have to give in to it, and neither do you. I can Choose to make, learn and grow from my mistakes. I can choose to accept the fact that I am a flawed human being. I can CHOOSE to love myself through my mistakes. I can choose to believe, "You don't have to be perfect to be loved, you don't have to have it all together to prove your worth." You are perfectly imperfect just the way you are.

Learn it. live it. love it!

xoxo,

Ryen