If you’ve got it…
Interacting with others often involves a lot of bluffing or hidden information. First and foremost, it’s impossible to wholly know another person but beyond that, a lot of the information about someone isn’t entirely relevant to any given interaction they have with another someone.
Sometimes, the hidden information is exactly irrelevant. I don’t talk about my fear of ceiling fans with friends because our relationship has exactly nothing to do with that.
Sometimes — what may feel more often than not — the hidden information is incredibly relevant, but the implications of the information deter sharing. I don’t talk about my depression on a first date (anymore) because I am trying to be enticing (and we live in a world where sadness often invokes disgust or pity).
As a human being, I willingly submit to the idea that I am a collection of experiences and idiosyncrasies that help or hinder my ability to interact with other human beings. More commonly, my behaviors look like flaws or features, depending on the context. Part of this is entirely unavoidable, I live in a subjective reality with necessarily incomplete information about others.
On the other hand, since I have more information about my own behaviors and experiences, and at some point can be more conscious about how I talk about myself and my actions.
I get to tell my story.
As I eluded to before, I used to be completely candid about myself in regard to dating. This meant that my dating profile, and my persona in general, was long-winded, overly nuanced, and perhaps overly biased toward my “flaws.” I’m depressed, very introverted, not particularly sexual, overly analytical — I can go on a while. I would flaunt all of my red flags because I wanted men to “have me at my best if and only if they would have me at my worst.”
In my opinion, that’s a bold statement of self-love while also being a lot of self-sabotage. Just because I’m eager to show you where all the mines are doesn’t mean I haven’t asked you to walk through a minefield.
I felt bad as I cut my profile, and hid all of my “beautiful truths.” I’d spent so long learning to appreciate my faults and flaws, that admitting to the social stigma against them felt like defeat.
I didn’t stop being those things though. I didn’t even really stop talking about them. I just stopped calling them out.
Calling them out, by those names, was declaring them as the flaws that people know.
If they’re flaws and I’m aware of them, theoretically I could make efforts to act against them and change my behavior.
I don’t do that. I don’t want to do that.
Because I do love my “flaws”. And it wasn’t “having me at my worst,” it was just “having me at my most.”
They’re my features and facets. They’re how I know and love myself best. When I rattle them off as red flags or qualifiers, they reduce my personality and my love to caltrops scattered around me. When I list them as flaws, I’m admitting to the colloquial worth of them as flaws.
In my mind, a flaw is something that happens accidentally and out of my control. But I do have the choice to act on or against my instincts. So when I do indulge my introversion, I refuse to call it a flaw.
Same goes for my depression. Or my occasional conversational tactlessness, my disregard for clutter, or any other “downside” I’ve accrued over the years.
It ends up being about growth. When I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder at 11, I wore it like chic new jacket. I bragged about “being broken,” and boasted my new pills like I’d finally found the edge I needed to be loved.
After all, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
I did the same for all my other traits, showing them off like a weird kid displaying rocks and animal bones from their backyard during show-and-tell. And when I continued along a string of rejection, I proclaimed boldly that “they just weren’t buying what I was selling.”
In a small way, that’s true. But it also meant I wasn’t buying “it” either, I was just stuck with “it.”
Over time, I kept talking about my flaws as if they are the distance between me and others. I think it helped me feel special, maybe even as a defense against not being loved.
That’s circular thinking. “People will love me because I’m unloved or unloveable.”
In the last several years though, I’m taking a different approach. I’m growing into my flaws. So many of them are like hand-me-downs, except instead of clothes it’s familial trauma I inherited. Instead of just wearing ill-fitting, dated clothing I’ve decided to make it my own and slay the fucking house down. I’m learning to take all these pieces I considered weird or broken, and making them the best me in my own eyes.
After all, I’m not just stuck with myself. I get to be me.
Cracks and all.
And you know what they say — “if you’ve got it, flaw-nt it.”
Sincerely Not Perfect,
August
