My Flawed Understanding of Flaws
Posted: Saturday, October 29, 2011
by Tex Norman
I wish I could say I had A flaw, but that is to admit too little. I am Flawed. I am the essence of flawed. All my life the one thing I was absolutely certain of is that I was broken and worthless. If someone said to me, “Well, nobody is perfect,” I would gain no comfort from the insight. I grew up knowing that I was not just Not Perfect, I was flawed, faulty, damaged, defective, substandard, malfunctioning, inferior. I never saw myself as an under achiever. I was an over achiever. If I earned a “D” on a test it was not because I sluffed off studying, oh no. If I earned a “D” it was because I pushed myself. Without Herculean effort, I would have all Fs. I was a loser. I was a dim bulb. I was stupid. I did not try to do better at anything because I was certain I was incompetent at everything.
I grew up hating myself, blaming myself for every mistake made, every turn of bad luck. I started seeing mental health professionals in 1981 and went twice a month until just a couple of months ago. That is 20 years of therapy, a dozen therapists, and so many psychotropic medications that when I walk I sound like package of Tic Tacs. I even spent a week in the crisis stabilization unit in the hospital because I grew to hate myself so profoundly that I scared my shrink and family.
I can (and do) blame my parents for much of this low self esteem and self loathing. I have also had some unfortunate turns in my life, but I just turned 61. Although my eye sight is weak, I am finally starting to see myself clearly. Well, I’m seeing myself better. I’m not flawless, but I’m less bothered by my flaws.
I remember reading a letter from a doctor, who received his medical education before the discovery of penicillin. The doctor recalled a time in Microbiology where they were growing bacteria in Petri dishes. The student doctor noticed places in the Petri dishes were there was a little black spot of mold and a circle of clear agar surrounded the dot. No bacteria would grow near that tiny speck of mold. The teacher looked at his Petri dishes and reprimanded him. “You’ve contaminated your agar,” he said. No one stopped to ask, why doesn't the bacteria grow near the mold? Now, of course, he realizes that these tiny dots of mold were penicillin. Had he, or his teacher seen the contamination for what it was, the first effective antibiotic would have been discovered a little sooner.
I wonder how many contaminates, how many mistakes, errors, accidents, flaws and flub-ups are really just misidentified blessings?
I toy with the words flaw and imperfection. A thesaurus might claim that flaw is a synonym for imperfection and imperfection is a synonym for flaw, but that would be wrong. A flaw is a mistake. An imperfection is not a mistake, it is just not perfect. An imperfection can be beautiful and valuable. The Pink Panther started off with this fictional diamond that had an imperfection within the stone that looked like a pink panther. The imperfection made the diamond more valuable, not less.
A synonym is always approximate. One word may be the synonym of a different word, but that does not mean the two words share identical definitions. We use these close, similarly defined words in our writing because it helps us avoid redundancy, but just because we freely substitute one word for the other does not mean those words are identical.
My problem was that I saw only two forms of existence. I was either flawed, or I was perfect. Since I wasn’t perfect that left only the flawed, inferior loser position. I could not see the area between flaw and perfect. Only now have I started to realize there is an area in between. We are all imperfect, but the imperfections do not destroy our value. The truth is our imperfections make us unique. Our imperfections give us our value. This means we should not be comparing ourselves to others because, like snowflakes, no two of us are exactly alike. Each one of us is beautiful in our own unique way. I am the greatest me on earth. There is no one that is a greater me than I am. And you are the greatest you . I will always be a lousy you. You will always be an awful me. But when we see our imperfections as unique traits that give us our one-of-a-kind status, well, how can that be a flaw?
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)What an awful childhood you must have had, to have grown up with such misconceptions about yourself. But I think it's truly amazing that you've been able to turn it around.
I love your last paragraph, it's inspiring!Thanks. I did have have a difficult childhood, but for the last 12 years I've worked investigating child abuse. I've learned that lots of children have a lot worse than I did. Children are resilient. The human spirit is amazing.
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