There Is No Ideal Human Being
The finish line kept moving because the woman I was chasing never existed.
I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of my life waiting to become the person I think I should be.
When I get that job. When I lose weight. When I find my husband. When I have kids. When my career takes off. When these headaches get better. When I get my strength back. When I get back in shape. When I feel like myself again.
The finish line keeps moving. It’s exhausting.
I went to a wedding last weekend and remembered that I really like people. I work from home and spend most of my time alone, usually quite happily. I hadn’t realized how isolated I’d become until I found myself sitting at a table with a bunch of people I barely knew and having a genuinely wonderful time.
I don’t particularly like people as a whole. I like individual people. I want to know why you believe what you believe, what you’re afraid of, what you’re proud of, what makes you laugh, how you prep your brisket, and what happened twenty years ago that you still think about in the shower. I want the details that make you unlike everyone else.
It was hot that day. Early on in the evening, one of the men at our table announced that it was time to take off his jacket, and three other men immediately stood up and took off theirs too. No one wanted to be the first, but everyone wanted to remove their jackets. I immediately liked the guy who was brave enough to take his off first.
Not important, but I wanted to share my poor decision making:
My own pursuit of comfort involved the cold white wine.
B kept appearing with a fresh glass whenever mine was empty. I was busy talking and laughing and enjoying myself and failed to keep track of how many of those glasses appeared. I even joked that he should take away the two empties from in front of my seat so that no one could count. This was a mistake. It took two days to recover.
When I told my sister, she said, “I think maybe we’re reminded of our drinking limitations about every ten years or so, so you were due.”
I’ve been thinking about younger versions of myself a lot lately, though, and not only because of my deteriorating ability to metabolize alcohol.
I’m writing a novel, and somewhere along the way I realized I had created a young woman who is a version of who I wish I could have been at her age.
She’s confident. Smart. Capable. She likes herself. She’s comfortable with her sexuality, but also knows herself enough to know when sex might harm her emotionally.
I didn’t intentionally sit down and create the woman I wish I’d been. I just created a heroine I could respect. My writing partner suggested that I could make her more flawed and it might be interesting. I responded that if she had flaws, I couldn’t love her as much as I do now.
Even as I said it, I realized that flawless is the unreasonable expectation I set for myself too.
There has always been this woman I thought I was supposed to become.
She was smart, but not just smart. She was the kind of smart that other people recognized immediately. She was composed in every situation. Focused. Successful. Sophisticated. She made excellent decisions. She probably ran a company or worked in some fascinating technology field where people sat around a conference table and collaborated on new ideas.
She was also beautiful. I’ve always been cute. And for some reason, I spent years believing that was the lesser category. Beautiful women were sexy. Sophisticated. Powerful. They walked into rooms and were noticed. Cute women got patted on the head.
It didn’t occur to me that perhaps I was comparing an actual human being with a fictional character I’d constructed out of the best qualities of every woman I’d ever admired.
I did it with more than appearance.
I’ve always been scattered. I’m interested in too many things. I can be completely consumed by one project and then discover another fascinating thing and want to do that too. My brain seems to believe choosing one road is unnecessarily restrictive when there are seventeen perfectly interesting side roads available.
I have spent years trying to fix that. Surely Successful Julie would focus. Successful Julie would pick a thing. Successful Julie would finish all her projects and, I assume, her closets would also be organized. I have no evidence for the closet thing, but she seems like she’d have that handled.
The strange thing is, I don’t expect other people to be this person.
One of the women I met at the wedding was tall and gorgeous and apparently has an amazing collection of Jordans. She, meanwhile, was talking about what a pain it is to find shoes in her size and how she won’t wear some brands because of how long they make her feet look. Her feet didn’t make her any less attractive to me, but they were part of the complicated reality of being her. The conversation moved on before I could tell her I would happily trade my size-seven feet for her beautiful long legs.
I grew up with a mother who noticed things. She noticed whether clothes were flattering, whether they were appropriate for the occasion, whether the weather woman on television had made a questionable wardrobe decision that morning.
We still tease her, as our family does when you slip up 40 years ago, in a whiny voice that sounds nothing like her: “Honey, I’ll buy you a perm.” Translation – Your hair looks awful. “Could you not find your matching socks?” Translation – That outfit combination isn’t working. “I’ll always see you as my blond baby.” Translation – Your natural hair color is flat and dull.
My mother is extraordinarily kind and I don’t say this to blame her for my insecurities. I think she was probably thinking many of the same things about herself. But somewhere along the way, I learned to look at myself with an evaluator’s eye.
Is this right? Is this appropriate? Is this attractive? Is this successful enough? Am I doing this the way I’m supposed to?
There was always room for improvement.
The funny thing is that I did get married. I did become a mother. I got the flipping highlights. I’ve owned businesses and created things and done all sorts of things that younger me thought would surely qualify as having arrived.
But I’ve never arrived.
Because the requirements changed.
When we get settled in a new city, I’ll accomplish this. When I get rid of the art supplies I’m selling, I’ll start doing this. I’ve spent years dealing with headaches and telling myself that when they get better, I’ll do things. When they’re gone, I’ll exercise and get back in shape. When my body starts cooperating again, I’ll…
There it is. Again.
When.
I can look back thirty years now and see a young woman I didn’t appreciate nearly enough.
She was cute. She had a million ideas. She wasn’t always confident and definitely didn’t always make the right decisions. But she was interesting. Creative. Funny. Curious. She loved people. She kept trying things.
She was pretty great, but I just didn’t know it.
And the uncomfortable thing I’m beginning to understand is that I haven’t changed. I’m on target to spend the next thirty years doing exactly the same thing to the woman I am today.
I could wait until my body is better. Until my work is more successful. Until I’m more focused. Until I figure out what I’m doing next. Until I become some improved version of myself who finally earns my approval. And if I’m lucky enough to be here thirty years from now, I could look back at this woman and wonder why she couldn’t see what she had while she had it.
There is no ideal human being. This seems incredibly obvious now that I’ve written it.
That ideal human would keep their suit coat on at the wedding, they’d be perfectly beautiful, perfectly confident, perfectly focused, perfectly successful, never say the wrong thing, make the right emotional decisions, maintain an organized closet and still be able to drink unlimited glasses of white wine at a wedding in their fifties.
And, I probably wouldn’t want to hang out with them for very long.
I’ve wasted entirely too much time trying to become that person.
I’m not going to tell you that I’ve suddenly learned to love everything about myself. I haven’t. I don’t even know that I know myself particularly well without the running commentary about what needs improvement. Maybe that’s what comes next.
Instead of studying the distance between who I am and who I think I should be, maybe I start studying the woman who’s actually here.
What does she like? What is she good at? What makes her happy? What feels right to her when nobody is grading her? Who is she when she’s not waiting to become someone else?
I don’t know yet.
But I’d like to find out before another thirty years go by.
