This is a different sort of post than what you might be used to around here. And honestly? It’s just as much a reminder for me as it is a read for you. So please hang out and don’t click away somewhere else just yet.
A little background story to put things into perspective: When I was four years old, my family took me camping. The campground had a “treasure hunt” to dig up silver dollars put in plastic baggies. I did not find a single one. I did not take it well. At all. As the story has been told for decades now, I flopped my little self on the lakeside beach, and wailed, “I’m such a failure!” Now understand, when the family tells it, it’s with lots of laughter over how utterly ridiculous a thing this is to come out of a child and haha isn’t she a scream? When in reality, the response should have been to dig deeper and find out why a small girl is already afraid of imperfection.
I have struggled with the need to be perfect all my life. It goes above and beyond a reasonable desire to strive for excellence. There are reasons and as an adult, I’ve come to examine these thought patterns and recognize them for the lies that they are. All this to say, I have absolutely let this particular difficulty paralyze me and stop me from doing things that I wanted to do, or even needed to do. Because if it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t good enough. If I didn’t have everything exactly lined up and capable of executing without a flaw, I couldn’t move forward with the first step.
So in this context, let me drop some truth in your lap, as well as mine:
It doesn’t have to be perfect.
Your body doesn’t have to qualify for America’s Next Top Model. (Is that even a thing anymore?) Your dinner you cooked does not have to be Pinterest worthy. Your living space does not have to be set up for display for Instagram. You and your life are just that, yours.
In the vein of this particular blog, let me list a few more things that don’t actually have to be perfect:
- Your homecooked meals
- Your budget
- Your organization
- Your body
- Your morning routine
- Your bedtime routine
- Your daily 8 cups a day of water
Hang out here long enough and you’ll find that most of my recipes are more a go-with-the-flow and wing it type of cooking. Unless you’re baking (which does require some degree of precision for chemistry’s sake), you can totally improv most things that you cook. Don’t have a full one cup of mushrooms? Oh well! Use what you have! Don’t have jack cheese? Use the cheddar! It’s more important to apply yourself to learning the basic processes of money management and cooking, than to follow a system down to the -nth degree.
Look, I understand. I grew up with the American school system that indoctrinates us that it’s unacceptable to have wrong answers. I was the kid who came home from middle school seriously contemplating self-harm because I’d come home with a B+ on a test, and I knew that I knew that I knew my life was no longer acceptable to be lived. But here’s the truth that I needed then and I need now too:
Failures are how we learn. How we grow. How we become better people. Failure is its own success.
Yeah so last month, I didn’t stick to my budget exactly as laid out on the 1st. In fact, most months, I don’t. Life happens. Circumstances change on the fly. Household necessities break, bread molds early, and your dog gets into something she shouldn’t be eating. Now hopefully you’ve got an emergency fund in place so when these things happen, it’s a mere annoyance and not a financial crisis. If you don’t, I do suggest popping over to read my How to Make a Budget and How to Save Money on Food posts. But yeah, talk to me sometime about the day that all four of our tires went flat, the 20-year old microwave finally died, and the free-but-ancient lawnmower refused to work again…while facing a nastygram from the city because we hadn’t weed whacked the edging. (Seriously, they threatened to pull our residency permit over weeds on the fenceline. Rude.)
If you didn’t meet your budget exactly last month, don’t quit and say budgeting doesn’t work! Hang in there, look at the data and adjust for this month. Then do the same next month. And next year. Keep plugging at it. Did you only spent $180 of your budgeted $200 on groceries? That’s a win! Oof did you go over on your fast food budget by an embarrassing amount? It’s okay! Take a lesson from it: either you need to increase that budget to be realistic for your life, or you need to buckle down and cook at home more. Either one is wholly acceptable. But don’t let that slide by you and ignore it just because it’s hard to look at something that you didn’t nail perfectly.
No one is grading you on how well you manage your money. If they are, you need to set some serious and firm boundaries. The only times anyone other than you gets a say in how your finances function are 1. you keep hitting them up for money to stay afloat or 2. it’s your spouse. (Please work with your spouse, if you have one.)
Repeat after me: You don’t pay my rent.
It’s the financial variant of “you don’t pay my sub.” If you know, you know. But also accept the hard fact that if you are borrowing/begging for money from someone else, you are giving them a vote in how you manage your money. Don’t like it? Don’t do it. Find a way that keeps your independence. Even if it means selling your fandom collectibles on Marketplace to keep the power on. Is that the ideal solution? Probably not. But that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
I hope this has been a worthwhile read for you, and that you’ve taken away some encouragement. It’s okay to take a deep breath and say Good Enough. It’s just fine to eat the rice dish that stuck to the bottom of the pan. It’s okay to substitute in zucchini for bell peppers because you hate peppers. Or to use regular bread crumbs in your meatloaf instead of panko because you forgot you finished off the panko last time. You forgot to pay your credit card a day late and got hit with a fee? Take it on the chin, pay the fee, and put a reminder on your phone to pay two days early next time. You forgot your Netflix sub was being auto-debited and now you’re $6 short on rent. Call your landlord and have an adult conversation, let them know the situation with an assurance that you’re going to pay on your next paycheck, instead of ghosting them for two weeks.
There’s a reason it’s called Life and not Perfection.
It doesn’t have to be perfect.
Love, Momma
