The Stranger I Became
When the desire to become better slowly turns into the habit of rejecting who you are.
Trying so hard to fit into the ball of perfection,
taking note of every speech to pick out flaws.
Never accepting wins,
everything has to be perfect.
Regretting every move that reflects my person,
because it does not fit my pictured self.
Only excited when I sound as perfect as I feel I should.
The struggle for perfection has made me a stranger to myself.
I have coiled myself around my pictured self
and lost my true nature.
What makes my face beam with smiles?
What gives my heart a peaceful beat?
I run after a perfection that is not me,
a world I am building not for happiness,
but to make people feel I am happy.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped being myself and started becoming the person I thought I was supposed to be.
I became too conscious of how I spoke, how I acted, how I looked, and even how people might interpret my silence. Every little mistake became something to regret. Every imperfect moment became a reason to question myself.
I wanted to get everything right.
I wanted my words to sound right, my actions to make sense, and my decisions to reflect the perfect version of me that existed in my imagination.
But somewhere in that endless pursuit, I began losing myself.
I stopped enjoying things because I was too busy evaluating them. I stopped celebrating my little victories because they never seemed good enough. Even when I did something well, my mind was already searching for what I could have done better.
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I became my own harshest critic.
The saddest part is that I didn't even realise how much of myself I was giving up. I thought I was growing. I thought I was becoming better. I thought being this hard on myself was simply part of self-improvement.
But there is a difference between wanting to grow and constantly punishing yourself for not being perfect.
Growth should not require you to hate who you are today.
You should be allowed to make mistakes without questioning your entire existence. You should be able to speak without replaying every sentence afterwards. You should be able to show up, even when you are not at your best.
Life is not a performance, and you do not have to get every scene right.
Perhaps the person you are desperately trying to become is not someone you need to create from scratch. Perhaps you just need to give yourself enough room to exist without constantly correcting yourself.
I am learning that perfection is a tiring destination because it keeps moving. There will always be something to improve, something to change, something that could have been done differently.
And if I spend my entire life chasing that version of myself, when will I have the chance to actually live?
I don't want to become so perfect in my imagination that I become unrecognisable in reality.
I want to laugh without analysing the sound of my laughter. I want to speak without editing every word in my head. I want to make mistakes and still be kind to myself.
I want to grow without abandoning myself in the process.
Maybe the greatest form of self-improvement is learning to become better without making yourself feel like you are never enough.
I don't want to spend my whole life becoming someone I can admire while forgetting to love the person I already am.
