La Buddhiste Francaise

“I will hold myself to a standard of grace, not perfection.” -Emily Ley

This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn and while I’m still working on it, this is where I’ve truly grown the most recently.

I’ve always been a ‘perfectionist’, as nasty and vile and terrible as that word is now-a-days. Everything had to be perfect, look perfect, stay perfect. And being a perfectionist is so unattainable. Anything I did, while amazing, was never perfect. I always beat myself up over it.

I used to paint and draw. Really beautifully actually. But I can’t look at them. Ever. All I see are the mistakes, places where I feel I could have done better, agonizing over everything that wasn’t perfect. To this day I still can’t look at any of my paintings and drawings I used to do. And this thinking is what made me stop doing all those artistic things. If I couldn’t do them perfectly, then why do them at all? Until eventually I wasn’t doing anything and I was lost with seemingly no purpose or direction in life.

That’s when my self-help addiction began. And of course I had to be perfect at that too. The self-help did help me though in that the more books I devoured, I started to uncover the truth, my truth on what was “wrong” with me (as a perfectionist, if I wasn’t perfect at something it was because there was something wrong with me). And my truth was that I was a perfectionist in a bad sense.

Once this realization hit, I started to really examine my life. From the outside, it looked amazing. “Perfect” actually. I looked like I had it together, polished, put-together, could handle anything. Internally though, I was a mess. Unhappy. Unfulfilled. Unsure of everything.

That’s when my obsession with French women started. I saw how amazing these women were and desperately wanted to be just like them. Of course all I was seeing was the stereotype of this woman, but it was enough to send me on the right track for my own journey. I loved their hair, even though it wasn’t perfectly coifed. I loved their makeup looks, even though it showed their blemishes and imperfections. I loved their lifestyle, even though it sometimes seemed all over the place. The more I learned about them, the more I wanted to grow up to be just like them. And that’s what helped me start to break past my perfection addiction.

This journey didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it’s been going for well over 15 years. And just like any addiction, I have relapsed at times. I have times where I fall off the band wagon. But the key is that I keep getting right back up again, embody my own “french woman” persona and start over. Only each time I start over, I’m further along in my journey.

But where does the ‘grace’ bit come into play? French women are known to be feisty, perhaps a bit rude sometimes, demanding as well. Those aren’t very ‘graceful’ qualities. The grace I embody is not the prim, proper, ladylike ways of gentrified women. The grace is with myself. The grace and compassion to take myself as I am each and every day without judgement. Each day I showed up differently depending on what was going on in my life, how I was feeling, but I made sure to have grace with myself.

Grace for myself looked like me focusing on the happy things in my life, the beautiful things in my life, the positive things in my life. The ‘imperfections’ were still there, but I was purposefully choosing to only look at the portions of my life that were making me happy and fulfilled. Some call this mindfulness (my Buddhism studies which started around the same time as my French Girl obsession definitely helped with this), but I love the idea of calling it ‘having grace with yourself’.

I still do this on a daily basis. I’m sitting in my office right now as I type this and sure, there’s dust bunnies in the corner, the trash can is full, and the window is dirty, but the candle I have burning smells absolutely delightful, the music playing is soothing to my soul, and the iced latte I’m drinking is so satisfying. I look out the window past the dirty glass and see my giant plumeria tree in full bloom, can hear the fountain bubbling in the backyard, and I take a deep happy breath because while my life is not perfect, it has grace and that’s more than enough for me.