I'm not perfect and can't fix you

I've thought about this post probably 50 times in the past week.  The thing is it's public, and the thought of managing a blog makes my heart go pitter patter, but not in the fun, romantic way.  But I believe personal expression is one of the easiest and most therapeutic things we can do for ourselves, and I have thoughts to share with y'all.  

You may be wondering about the title of this post, but what I really want to discuss is the idea of resiliency.  Each one of us have both risk and protective factors woven into our identity: things that work for us or against us in life.  The fewer risk factors we have and the more protective factors we have, the better prepared we are to manage stress in our life.  The problem is that we have very little control over the risk factors we have because they begin making an impact when we're children.  Based on my risk factors, I shouldn't be living the life that I'm living.  I should be more anxious and less successful. Wait, what? I should still be plagued by thoughts of "I'll never be good enough," but I'm not, because of resiliency.  We cannot forget that we all have things in our life designed to protect us and harnessing these, along with a little hope and gumption, decreases the power of our risk factors.  

I want you to breathe a sigh of relief when reading the title of this post.  Perfect means unrelatable and robotic.  Perfectionism also breeds procrastination and giving up.  And though you may feel broken, you are not.  I don't believe people become broken because of their emotional health problems.  I believe we become versions of ourselves that lose hope and suffer, sometimes for a really long time, until we're ready and willing to do something different.