The quest for perfection started before anyone you’ve ever known was born, and will end when everyone in the world dies. The human race is so obsessed with what is considered to be the best; from perfect cars to the best road conditions, from priceless treasures to a perfect 24k gold. I would know since I grew up in the Golden state of California, where attempting to find anyone who wasn’t obsessed with the perfection trend was like attempting to have a double-sided conversation with a corpse: it just wasn’t going to happen without a little insanity. I happen to know a little about that too, because death was what made me fall face-first into my flaws and away from the perception of perfection.
One of my close friends was accidentally decapitated in front of me during the fourth grade, leaving me emotionally crippled. I hid inside of myself, drawing deeper into my mind and pretending that reality was really an illusion; it was within this way that I became sheltered. Emotions were virtually non-existent for me, and trying to reach any of them was an impossible as attempting to make an arm amputee write a legible novel with his shattered arm stumps; not allowing for the possibility of a voice-activated computer program or a class to teach him how to write with his toes. My body was just a shell of smoothed hard, wood, unmovable and completely lacking extravagance. I pulled away from my living friends so that my mind could dwell on my first dead one. I could not cry, and I refused to open up my heart to new friends or new scars.
I became a paradable marionette, opening my mouth to speak only when unbearable strings were yanked at, compelling my tongue to move and create sounds of undistinguishable anguish. Mostly I reserved my speech for occasions where I was prompted, or to give out an answer to a teacher who had specifically asked me for it. Very rarely were these answers correct, my grades were subtly plummeting and I didn’t care about the consequences for my actions. Being grounded could no longer frighten me, because it wasn’t like I had any real friends to better spend my time with. I was becoming a creature, only living to breathe, eat, and sleep.
Within days, I had begun to sink into nightmares that played the scene over and over again in my head. I watched her curled, black hair flowing in the wind that was contrived from the speed she was zooming away at, I saw her deliciously enchanting laugh peel out from her throat, making her head lean back. I observed as her curls intertwined with the furious spinning wheels and heard the crack of her neck against the unpainted wood. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her bouncing head that rolled its way down the go-cart track, blood trailing behind it.
During the daytime, my mind painted imaginary pictures of me on that track, lying and embracing her headless body and whispering my selfish prayers and secrets into her lifeless chest. I would secretly hope that every time I closed my eyes she would be in one piece, a solid body with a head attached to her neck, but the only image that resided in my mind was her blank eyes screaming at me. They haunted me everywhere I went, motivating me to join her at the one place I was too afraid to revisit. I’d be lying to you if I said that suicide hadn’t crossed my mind every time I looked over at her empty desk, but I can assure you that I never did try it. The torture I had been building up in my head was a strong enough punishment, and I felt like death would have been the easy way out. Instead, I chose to observe life instead of attempting to truly live it.
Through this, I found that everyone views their own situation to be the most tragic, and that I am no exception. My life seemed so pitiful to me, and to this day I do not understand why that was my apparent truth at the time. Yes, my friend had been slaughtered, and yes, I was there to see it. But why did that need to shake my whole foundation, until I started to crumble? It was a big wakeup call for me, which allowed me to see what my life had turned into: a giant race of consumption and useless products, clothes, and electronics. All that seemed to matter was who had the best things, the best grades, the best house. Perfection was my one and only thriving goal, it was the only thing that anyone I knew seemed to care about.
Our teachers wanted us to have perfect, skyrocketing GPA’s, our parents prided themselves on the ideas that we were perfectly obedient, and our peers were so corrupted with the thoughts of designer clothing with perfect, posh logos on the front that they ceased to care about what was hiding underneath their polished exteriors. My world was spinning out of control right in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t reach out my hands to anyone and alert them of what I now knew because I had become so timid.
Of course, my timid nature was not very apparent to my classmates because I had learned to act out, to be seemingly bold and dramatic. No one could have possibly guessed about the internal struggle I was dealing with, and even if they had, they were much too obsessed with becoming the perfect human being that they wouldn’t have cared. They probably would’ve been glad to take someone out of the running, like Tonya Harding when she attacked Nancy Kerrigan in the 1994 Olympics. For perfection, cost was of no concern, even if it was the cost of their integrity.
After my realization, I started to think deeply about what separates life from death. Not much really separates us from corpses, except for the fact that we have the ability to change our situations. If something happens that isn’t quite what we were expecting, we adapt. The closest that corpses come to adaptation is molding into the ground, and that is only if they were buried. Those of us who are alive have the chance to change, re-do, re-write, reflect, and rediscover ourselves. Take for instance the man you happen to pass by everyday, the one who is begging for change and is so obviously homeless. You have the ability to help him, either by choosing to provide him with change or to encourage him to change himself. I don’t mean that you should assume he’s into drugs or alcohol, because that isn’t going to help anyone. All you need to do is show him a little kindness, and you never know, it may encourage him to become a conventional contributor to society.
All I know is that the quest for perfection has changed us into humanoids: we look like humans, but have somewhere lost the ability to care for other humans along the road. We expect for everyone to be able to carry themselves and their problems on their own, but through my experience, I have learned that this doesn’t always work. Through the help of a friend about five years later, I was able to pick myself up. Through her, I learned how to carry other people when they drop their heads down into the garbage that is their life, waiting to be thrown away. And I hope that through me, you will feel inspired to do the same.
Once, there was a girl who heard that perfection lived inside of a golden box inside of a cave at a mountaintop nearby. She gathered her worldly possessions in a little sack and headed her way up to the mountain, completely ignoring the beautiful flowers in the fields, the clear water of the meadows, and the shining stars of the night sky; simply so that she could quickly reach perfection. When the girl reached the cave, she frantically searched through the darkness for the golden box, but could not find it. It was only when she declared the search hopeless and began to cry did she spot it. It was giant, with intricate carvings on the top that depicted her past with such detail that she began to relive her life. She watched her many birthdays pass, she laughed at old jokes, and cried at the same sad ballads she had grown up with. She was so involved with the box’s portrayal of her, that she did not even notice when the stone walls of the cave began to crumble down, creating a big whole in the ground. She only had a minute to decide whether she would escape without the box, or take her last minute inside the box, experiencing perfection. She never looked inside the box to see what perfection held because she had found a more priceless prize: she had finally found herself.
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