...seeking moderation

…obsessively average

Dear me,
Beware. A quest for perfection promises lifelong dissatisfaction (along with encouraging compulsive behaviors, like sorting underwear drawers and Legos). Find temperance somewhere. T.

The life of moderation is a difficult and lonely road. It’s hard to glide along being happy about achieving the goal of good enough——to fly on the heels of that anxious stride for excellence.

I find that maintaining a mediocre lifestyle is draining, in part due to the lack of outside reinforcement. I have to fly solo on this as there are no clubs or support groups, no workshops or interventions for the zealously average and I’ve yet to find a pill to assist me in being hopelessly mundane. I have scoured the self-help shelves for books, or even articles on maintaining one’s imperfection, but there’s not one. No author aspires for a Pulitzer in pedestrian, or a Nobel prize for normalcy. There are no red-carpet award shows for the successfully average.

I look for my own average individual to emulate, and just when I think I’ve found it, I get to know her, and realize that she too is striving to be better … and pssffft there goes my vision and my quest goes on.

Dear me,
I’m going to be very disappointed (but curiously relieved) when the person I’ve picked and placed on my pedestal to admire and aspire to be like, trips and falls back to human. And it is particularly discomforting when that person is me.

Once in awhile, I wander over and check out my self-help shelf. If I’ve accumulated more books on striving for perfection than curing myself of it, then I know that once again, it’s time to get real. So in an effort to benefit all mankind, I’ll sacrifice and leave the laundry to mold, the dishes undone, and the bed unmade. I surrender! I’ll take shoes from closets and fling them haphazardly in the doorways to reassure everyone that I’m ordinarily average and absolutely, obsessively imperfect.

Now I just have to explain this to the husband.