Accidental Perfection

“Accidental Perfection”

 

“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.”

Mother Teresa

           

Over the summer the kids and I went on a road trip.  This is the third year we have done so and it has become a much-anticipated event.  We have visited many friends but always go to see my college roommate and her family in Indiana as the main part of our trip.

This year, while visiting, my friend’s fifteen-year-old son made us guacamole.  It was really good and we told him so.  He didn’t seem to believe us, and, at first, deflected the compliments we were lobbing at him.  He claimed he had forgotten an ingredient, or that he hadn’t cut this or that correctly.  After his mother and I insisted that it was indeed really great guacamole, he smiled and shrugged and said, “I guess it’s just accidentally perfect then.”

I stored this memory in the notes section of my phone to revisit for a post later because it was a profound sentence and interaction.  Last night I thought of it again when I received a text message from someone in my twelve-step program.  I was asked to speak on New Year’s Eve at my home group.  I accepted and told the woman who will be chairing the month of December that I would be happy to and that it would, in fact, be an honor to speak at my home group.  She wrote back that the honor was all hers and proceeded to tell me that I was an inspiration to her and several other really lovely things that profoundly touched me.  Now I don’t mention that to pat myself on the back or because I want more compliments, but because it took me back as compliments always do.  My gut reaction is to deflect them like my son’s friend did about the guacamole.  My instinct is to tell her that I could not possibly be an inspiration to her or anyone else, that I was a hot mess for so long, that I am nothing remarkable and that she should not waste her breath.

However, that gut reaction is now quick to die out.  That voice in my head that told me for so many years I was worthless and still rears its ugly head when someone says something nice to me, is so much quieter than it was.

It took me many years to get to a place where I have re-trained my brain to move past the negative and allow in the positive.  It hasn’t been easy.  I didn’t get sober and go through the steps until I was 41.  In that process I found a spiritual connection all my own.  I found a Higher Power and understood myself for the first time.  That journey led me to discover my humanity and with that I embraced all of myself, including my many flaws.

Not too long ago Dermot and I were talking about standards of beauty.  He told me I was beautiful and my instinct was not to believe him.  I wanted to disbelieve my own son when he told me I was beautiful.  Think about that for a moment.  How much self-doubt and self-loathing do you have to have fed yourself on that you would doubt the sincerity of your child when they innocently compliments you in conversation?  I stopped myself in mid-thought, smiled at my humanity when he said it and simply thanked him instead.  I have discovered that the flaw is not in the way that I look, but in the way that I think about the way that I look.  The flaw is not in the way that people see me, but in the way that I think about the way that people see me.

I think about it this way now…  Before the steps and doing extensive work on myself, I saw myself as if I were looking through a funhouse mirror.  My impression of myself was skewed.  Now I see myself more through God’s eyes and there is beauty there even in my many imperfections.  So the next time someone compliments you, pause, smile and accept it.

Maybe we are all accidentally perfect.