Perfectionism and not allowing yourself to make mistakes are very bad for your mental health. It took me way too long to realize this, and it caused a lot of damage that I am now trying to undo. Why is it bad for your mental health? Because nobody is perfect, except Jesus, so we ended up beating ourselves up and making ourselves feel like we aren’t good enough. Mistakes are how we learn. When we don’t allow ourselves to make mistakes or to own up to them, we don’t learn from them or grow. We then become stagnant, and stagnation becomes stinky and is unhealthy.
As KC Davis, LPC, author of How to Keep House While Drowning and Who Deserves Your Love, says, “good enough is perfect”. I’m not saying be lazy, but we don’t have to wear ourselves out or stress ourselves out striving for something unattainable and detrimental to our health. If all you have to give today is 80%, and you give that 80%, then you have given 100 %. Let’s be kind, gracious, and compassionate to ourselves. God knows that we aren’t perfect, after all, He did create us. He knows that we aren’t perfect, so He allows us to learn from the imperfect, from the mistakes that we make, from the mess-ups in our lives. And that, my friends, is the beauty in the ashes of it.
“To console those who mourn in Zion. To give them beauty for ashes. The oil of joy for mourning. The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified.”
Isaiah 61:3
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