“What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of what it’s supposed to be”
– Unknown
I have this image of a perfect life. I have an aesthetic breakfast every morning, do yoga, and floss my teeth. I make it to all of my classes, do all of my homework, and manage to hang out with all of my friends before 8 p.m. I go to the beach twice a week, I always smell amazing, and everything I own is organized perfectly.Â
That image partly comes from a loose combination of the media I’ve consumed throughout my life. Books about minimalism, pictures of vacations and smoothies on Instagram, movies with blonde-haired actresses riding bikes and sailing around the world. Couples reading books together in sweaters, morning routines with face masks and matcha, Nespresso machines and milk frothers. All of these curated images have come together to form an impossibly perfect expectation for me to live up to.
But it also comes from being a college student, especially since that college is Cal Poly. Everywhere I look, someone is getting some prestigious award or researching something so complex I don’t even understand the abstract. Everyone seems to be having beach bonfires or visiting Yosemite on the weekends. Every girl has a perfect tan and exercises twice a day. At Cal Poly, I’m surrounded by unusually ambitious, attractive, and outdoorsy people. Naturally, I always feel like I’m not doing enough.Â
The cost of this mindset is that I feel like an outsider. I feel like everyone else is going to a perfection seminar that I didn’t get invited to. Worse, I constantly have this urge, this feeling that I am right around the corner from having this perfect life. Yes, right now, some of my clothes are ones I stole from my middle school lost-and-found, but one day I’ll only have clothes from Brandy Melville and Lululemon. Yes, right now I have limescale on everything in my shower and my makeup products are two years expired, but one day I’ll wake up every day and do a face mask. Yes, my joke didn’t land at work yesterday, but one day I’ll finally figure out how to be effortlessly charming like the girl in my econ class.
If this struggle sounds familiar to you, I’m here to offer a word of advice: The image you’re comparing yourself to doesn’t exist. I wish I could tell you the moment I realized this, but there wasn’t one. It was more the slow recognition of a pattern — the life I imagined myself needing and the life that actually made me happy were almost never the same thing.
None of my favorite memories from college would look impressive from the outside at all. Laying on my best friend’s floor and bedazzling our phone chargers after drinking four margaritas each would never make it onto Instagram, but it’s one of the best nights I’ve had all year. Doing laundry with my boyfriend (in my worst laundry-day outfit ever) for three hours and watching Lost would make for terrible content, but I’ve never felt so comfortable around someone. The point being: the messiest, ugliest parts of life are the best parts.
After two years at Cal Poly, I’ve started to confront my perfectionism and constant comparison, with absolutely freeing results. I’ve started to let my life be messy, to ignore the idea that someone else is doing it better. The more I mess up, the more I feel like myself, and the more I feel grateful for the life I’ve built.
In short, not even your most put-together friend is always put together. The perfect “it girl” you’re looking toward has weird days too. She orders something online that’s missing a piece. She gets a meal at a restaurant that tastes weird. Her phone dies in the middle of an emotional call. The point being – once you stop comparing yourself to this shared delusion of absolute perfection, you can start to focus on the messy, beautiful parts of your life that actually make it worth living.