How to Accept Yourself As an Imperfect Yet Unique Individual
How to accept your imperfect and unique self? If this generation of youth does not think about these things now, the further they go, the more difficult it will be. Young people need to realize that they are a new generation. The tradition of agricultural society requires perfection, like the gorgeous cheongsam in the movie “In the Mood for Love”, it is beautiful and very good. But gorgeousness is a kind of bondage. In order to maintain beauty, people are tightly wrapped up, and their inner emotions cannot be released. Beauty is a mature culture and a series of standards formed by previous civilizations. But when the new generation moves forward, they will be rampant, they will inevitably be imperfect, they will inevitably be full of deficiencies, and they will inevitably be sharp and rough. If this era pursues inherent perfection, it is largely a kind of strong pruning of the self.
“Thin Snow” written by Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki is particularly good in this regard. The protagonists of “Thin Snow” are four sisters from a famous family. Among the four sisters, the third one pursues perfection. She graduated from an English major and wanted to be like a traditional woman, instead of going out to work and arranging flowers in a kimono at home. On the other hand, she wanted to go on a blind date and find someone she loved, but fish and bears You can’t have both. The times are changing, young people are looking for a new state of life, and the degree of professionalization is getting higher and higher. The fourth child is different. She broke the paradigm of the three older sisters, supported herself, had three boyfriends, eloped with the first boyfriend, and forced her family to agree to marry the third boyfriend on the grounds of pregnancy. The third child looked at her with a vicissitudes of life on his face. But the fourth child represents the new young generation, who is going to the society by himself. Although he is not perfect, he is growing most powerfully.
Perfectionism is actually the biggest trap. Its standards and values are all extracted from the old model, and the new generation has nothing to rely on. If you want to break through, you must go through a lot of experience.
Young people want to know themselves, they cannot sit in a house and look at the sky from a well, they often need to know themselves in imperfect exploration, there is pain, there is joy, they find themselves alive in pain, they find themselves mediocre in joy, in this process Only then did I gradually know what kind of life I love and what kind of world I am connected with. This is the so-called passion of youth.
People like Picasso and Monet made new attempts in painting, broke the traditional and stereotyped regulations, and grew wildly with passion. Their “deviant” methods were not accepted by the world at first. Only when people encounter resistance can they touch themselves and reflect on whether their lives are real. Once a person touches himself in this wild way, his heart will be clear, and he will feel a sense of value and happiness. Once a person realizes this feeling, he will not give up. This kind of pleasure must be experienced on the road.
