It's OK to not be OK

I did a post last week about our expectations of people and events external to ourselves. Brandy struggles with expectations, but not those of others, those she has of herself. 

Brandy feels unworthy of happiness and love because she doesn't meet her own expectations. This is largely a remnant of her marriage in which perfection was expected. Of course,  she never met that expectation. She learned to expect it of herself and still does. This sets her up to fail and to disappoint herself continuously. It gets in her way with relationships because she fears the day it moves past the dizzy-in-the-head feeling of new love to something more serious. She fears showing her flaws. She fears the person running when they see her imperfections, many of us do.

Brandy has to learn is that imperfection doesn't make us unlovable and shouldn't keep us from being happy.  She knows this in her head, but she still beats herself up over every shortfall because she doesn't know it deep inside herself. We should expect the very best of ourselves, but we also have to accept that we are human. We cannot give a hundred ten percent endlessly. We get tired. We get sick. We get hurt. We feel sad. We say the wrong thing at the wrong time to the person we care about the most. That's human. That's life.

There's a saying about not being able to love someone else until you love yourself. Corny, I know. But true. For Brandy,  this means she has to love herself enough to take the risk of letting someone know her flaws and her strengths. She has to accept that some people will run because of certain flaws. She should do the same. Not that we should expect perfection, but we have to know what we are willing to deal with and what we are not willing to deal with. We have to set boundaries.