Letting Go of Perfection

Hello, my name is Bethany and I will never be perfect.

I prefer the term "unique".

This has been a hard, yet unbelievably freeing and important lesson I'm getting out of this year. I'm realizing more and more that part of growth is letting go of obtaining that perfect image of yourself and your life. If we continue to live our lives in an endless and impossible cycle of trying to reach perfection, how are we ever going to be happy? So I've been really working on letting go of what I thought I should be at this point in my life, the weight I believed I needed to reach, the job I needed to secure, even the stuff and security that I thought I needed.
For so long, I've beaten myself up for not having met the man of my dreams, having perfect children and the dream job. But the more I focus on what I don't have, the more I miss out on what I do.  Over the last few months, I've allowed myself, not give up the dream of being a mother and a wife, but to allow myself to love that version of myself if, indeed, that is who I turn out to be. The same goes for my career. I set this goal for myself to become huge in film and have been passionate about it for so long. But now in pursuing it, I've finally stopped to ask myself, "is the pursuing of it making me happy?" And I won't say that it doesn't, but I can't say, resoundingly, that it does. So I'm allowing myself to imagine other futures.
This is all quite ironic considering I began this whole year's journey trying to reach a perfected version of myself, and now I'm giving that up entirely. Now I realize that I must find happiness and peace through today and what's in front of me, and not through what I may or may not achieve tomorrow.

Oh, and one last thing. Life should not be take so seriously. To illustrate this point, I give you:

A horrible stock photo. Of myself. Yes, I did a stock photography shoot at one sad moment of my life. Luckily they are crap and will most likely never end up on the internet anywhere. Wait! Doh!