From the Meridian Library I got, via interlibrary loan, an inspiring 2024 book by Stephen Petrow titled The Joy You Make: Find the silver linings – even on your darkest days. There is a Google Books preview up to page 24. It has twenty-eight brief, unnumbered chapters that are titled as follows:
01] The Joy of Gratitude 1
02] The Joy of Authenticity 11
03] The Joy of Memory 22
04] The Joy of Freudenfreude 31
05] The Joy of Taking a Pause 38
06] The Joy of Solitude 45
07] The Joy of Cooking 59
08] The Joy of Getting Lost 71
09] The Joy of Your Name 79
10] The Joy of Solidarity 88
11] The Joy of Blue 102
12] The Joy of Writing by Hand 110
13] The Joy of Perspective 118
14] The Joy of the Cancer Ward 127
15] The Joy of Play 137
16] The Joy of Doing Nothing 146
17] The Joy of Imperfection 155
18] The Joy of a Christmas Miracle 164
19] The Joy of Being Single 175
20] The Joy of a Dance Party 184
21] The Joy of the Mundane 191
22] The Joy of Reading 198
23] The Joy of Sex 208
24] The Joy of Aging 219
25] The Joy of Uncertainty 229
26] The Joy of the Dark 238
27] The Joy of Julie 248
28] Epilogue 259
At the end of Chapter 17 about The Joy of Imperfection, starting on Page 161 he discusses:
“Learning to Embrace Your Imperfections
It’s so easy, so natural, and so unhelpful to focus on our own flaws. We make mistakes, we don’t have magazine-cover bodies, we haven’t had the career successes that we wanted. Other people’s lives seem perfect, and ours don’t measure up. Just spend five minutes on Instagram, where vacations, parties, pets, homes, and even our friends’ kids appear perfect. Anne Lamott has given this conundrum much thought, writing. ‘Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.
What can we do so we don’t hate what makes us who we are? Even better, to accept and embrace our true selves? And best of all, to learn how to love ourselves the way we are? For sure, there are a lot of New Agey philosophy types out there saying things like ‘You are special just as you are,’ and ‘Your flaws are your strengths in disguise.’ I just don’t know how helpful these mantras are in changing attitudes. Here’s where I chose to start:
Make a list of people and things you believe are perfect. Do your neighbors have a neat and well-kept house? Put them on the list. How about your boss and their well-behaved and well-dressed kids? Ditto. What about that Instagram friend who waxes to the moon about a recent vacation? List them all. Rhen, in a second column, write the mirror image of that supposed perfection. That tidy house – with a huge mortgage – maybe it takes hours of cleaning and neatening every week. Guess what? Maybe you don’t want to do that. Your apartment is a little more cluttered, but you have more time to spend on what you want. Stop making comparisons. Understand that your imperfect home may be just right for how you want to live. Do the same for everything and everyone you think of as perfect. What are you learning? Jot it down.
Now make a list of things you worry are imperfect about yourself. What are the mirror images of those? Your nose is too small, your ears too large? They are the genetic remnants of your ancestors, handed down to you as reminders that they once lived. You goofed up at work? With any luck, you went through an educational experience, free of charge. Yelled at the kids instead of being a perfect TV sitcom parent? Perhaps you taught them the lesson that even parents have limits (and yourself a lesson in when to take a breath and walk away).
Try to offset a perceived flaw with something that’s positive. For the longest time, I avoided looking at the scar that runs from my breastbone to below my navel (thank you, metastatic cancer). ‘A scar is a physical deformity, it’s a physical difference,’ Jeffrey Marcus, the chief of pediatric plastic surgery at Duke University, explained to me. People too often draw conclusions or make assumptions about attractiveness, intelligence, even capability based on something they see. In my case, I hated that scar so much I’d get dressed in the dark. Over time, as the scar faded along with those frightening memories, what had once been a stark reminder of my illness became something else altogether: a testament to my survival. Reading Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses one afternoon, I stopped in recognition when I came upon this line: ‘Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.’ Or, as Duke’s Jeff Marcus told me, ‘Some differences can be positive, too.’
The fact is that life is full of trade-offs, a mix of our own choices and the hand genetics dealt us. We are all creatures of this moment in history, a marvelous soup of traits both good and bad, and we make of it what we can. I hope that once you see your lists, it will become more obvious to you that nobody is perfect. From there, it’s a step or two to realize you’re good enough. And maybe that’s just fine – for now.”
The silver-lined cloud image by Christine Matthews came from Wikimedia Commons.
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