I read this book recently, called “Brave, Not Perfect” by Reshma Saujani. Before I get into how deeply it made me rethink my approach to life, I’m going to preface my rant by saying I did not agree with everything she said. Some of it felt like a reach to me, like when you start going down a flight of stairs, and it starts off deliberate, and then you just kind of let your body weight risk a dance with gravity, and sort of fall down the stairs not-so-gracefully. Meaning the part where she slams GoT’s Daenerys was thiiiis close to losing me altogether. But I prevailed. And I’m glad I did.
The handful of points where she and I don’t see eye to eye doesn’t render her voice or perspective invalid. In fact, I was riveted by the whole of the underlying message, that women are raised and conditioned to be “perfect,” and analyzing what impact that has on how we approach difficult or challenging situations in life.
This isn’t a book review, and I’m not going to steal Reshma’s thunder by giving you a blow-by-blow of her points.
But, at least in my case, she’s right.
I left my military career six months ago feeling like an utter failure. In truth, it was my body that had failed me. My leadership had failed as well, in not recognizing the signs that led up to my ultimate physical collapse. But I had failed myself, in not standing up for myself, in hiding my symptoms, in believing what my peers and leadership were telling me – that I was being weak, and needed to suck it up and push forward, when, in fact, I had contracted a permanent dysautonomic condition. I wanted to be the perfect soldier, so I tried to hide everything I was going through. Tried to bottle it up and shove it down in the attempt to convince myself and everyone around me that I was fine. When I really, really was not fine.
Striving for perfection is how I wound up where I am right now, recovering slowly, day by day, trying to learn how to navigate this new rest to active ratio. But now, looking at the current necessity to rest so that I can maintain consciousness during my next active period, I realize that my life has been plagued by the pursuit of perfection.
I even used to say “perfection may be impossible but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it.”
I’m rolling my eyes at young, naive me right now.
Reshma talks in her book about how women are significantly less likely to go after something because they don’t know how to do it, or aren’t good at it, or don’t know the right people, etc, etc. We’re more likely to not go for a job because the description doesn’t fit us to a tee. We’re more likely to react negatively to constructive criticism. Less likely to PROVIDE constructive criticism because we don’t want anyone to dislike us.
And let’s be real – there are still a lot of people in the world who aren’t ready for women who speak their minds, go for jobs they want, ask for raises, provide criticism. And some of those people are other women.
I’ve been reprimanded in a work situation – by a man – for being to curt with a female coworker. He said “I appreciate your directness, but you need to be softer on your female coworkers.”
From then on, I hesitated with every word I spoke at work.
Just another thing to add to the list of items that caused anxiety because I couldn’t figure out how to be this superstar superhero superemployee who said all the right things in the right tone to the right people and STILL managed to actually be professional, respected, AND productive.
Anxiety takes a lot of energy. And all of us have a finite amount of that. Why do we spend so much of our energy, our spoons, on angsting over this or that?
Something has to give.
At some point, we have to decide to be willing and ready to take the risk of pursuing something in the imperfect way that men are so uninhibited in pursuing. Going for the job we’re not qualified for, trying to do the thing we don’t know how to do, or are bad at, or whatever.
So I bought a domain name the other day. And web hosting.
I’ve been thinking about pursuing a blog for a long time now, and after a lot of debating, I decided to take the risk. Be imperfect. Maybe fail again, who knows. But I’m going to be brave. Take the leap.
Here we go.
When do you feel brave?
