It is many times that I have wished I could press a button and in a magical way turn back time. Not for long … just for one moment, enough for me to change everything. Make things the way I want, piece by piece until I take a breath and say “here we are, everything is now perfect!”.

“Perfection”, one word and one thousand attempts to get it and when I thought I was close it was getting a push and I was falling down. Perfection is not easy and I don’t mean that it is difficult to reach it … believe me, it is impossible … you will never succeed it. The “absolute” isn’t a simple thing. It isn’t something you wake up one morning and tell to yourself: “I don’t care if I make mistakes today and what others say about me, today I will accept myself just the way I am”.

Getting used to being perfect is an addiction, so it is something you do not consider so bad. You are a person and you have it in your blood, it is normal for you to get to the top. This is not irrational and but it is very difficult to realize that it doesn’t exist. Once addicted, a vicious circle begins: ‘my perfect image’, ‘my perfect home’, ‘my perfect car’, ‘my perfect family’ and in general ‘my perfectly happy life’. That’s the image I had made for myself for a period of my life. The negative in this case is that you don’t realize it in the first place and that you might even never quite catch it! This may mean that you spend your entire life with the constant stress that you haven’t done things properly.

At that stage of my life, the only thing I wanted to do was to excel in everything. Between you and me, this isn’t such a bad thing, but when you reach extremes, the balances change. I thought everything was fine, but one event made me completely change my perspective on the issue. I lost a person very dear to me. It is unfortunate that something unpleasant needs to happen first, before you get to understand certain things about life.

I suddenly realized that no matter how much I want to control situations, no matter how much I want to handle my life, I was forgetting two things. First of all, we don’t handle everything and secondly I was losing precious time looking for what is wrong and what I don’t like in order to change it. When I “screened” myself and started to “watch” from another point of view, as a viewer, I saw an exhausted face, my exhausted face. “Exhaustion”, I had been looking for a long time for the ‘flavour’ of the taste of waiting everything to move in the exact detail that you have planned and that flavour is, exhaustion.

From that point and onward, I promised to free myself from this obsession of being perfect. Since my decision, everything seemed simpler, time seemed precious and strangely, everything seemed quite ‘alright’. Accepting yourself isn’t easy, but not impossible! I may not be perfect and things may not revolve around me in a perfect orbit but this doesn’t stop my happiness. What matters is having people that love me all around me and above all, that I love myself.

Dora Tasiou (22). Her ‘moto’ is …”when you find out what makes you unique, then you will love yourself”.

Email: dwratas2@gmail.com