How To Be Perfect

I think I was 13 when I finally started noticing the clumpy, black mascara and smudged, sparkly eye shadow my friends would spend an hour putting on before eighth grade homeroom. I was so jealous of them. I didn't have any of my own make up, and all my mom had were several old Cover Girl eyeshadows, a blue eyeliner pencil from 1987, and a goopy, bubblegum colored, CVS brand lipstick. She was a total tom boy growing up (*GASP* how dare I use that phrase), and never got the make up or fashion memo.

I just wanted someone to teach me how to GLAM DA HECK UP.

And that is not what happened.

I remember the night I asked my mom if I could start wearing make up. I could tell that her motherly instincts kicked in and she sighed heavily before saying yes. Then, holding her hand in the air to pause my excitement, she told me something that, as an ignorant little teeny bopper, I totally ignored, but has become an important lesson:

"Your makeup should enhance your natural beauty. Do not use it as a mask to hide yourself from others."

I'm pretty sure I rolled my eyes at her. But now, ten years later, those words continue to ring in my ears, specifically the word "enhance."

My make up routine has since changed from the time I was 13 (thank goodness), but I've always followed my mom's advice and only used make up as a tool to enhance the beauty I already had.

Does it mean I'm never self conscious of how I look? Just today as I walked by a mirror, I caught a glimpse of my make up free face and messy hair, wondering if anyone would think I was beautiful looking like that. But it becomes increasingly worse when I get on Instagram and scroll through the photos of girls who are so beautiful they couldn't possibly be from this planet. It seems that social media has turned into a never ending competition of who can make their life look the most perfect using edited, filtered, professionally taken photos. Want to know the saddest part?

We believe it.

We look at these photos, realize they are posed, edited, cropped, and filtered, and then as if our memory is immediately erased, begin to FEEL BAD that we don't look like that, or that our lives don't look like that.

My social media habits began to make me question what my mom told me so long ago. Am I using social media to enhance the already beautiful parts of myself and my life? Or has it merely become a mask to hide behind so people cannot see the real, messy, imperfect, obnoxious, pimple-faced me? (I'm also fun.)

It's not a matter of completely boycotting social media, making a FaceBook status announcing your account deactivation, and trying to ignore the world around you. My mom didn't tell me, "Never wear make up ever!" She taught me, through my make up dilemma, to seek the things that will enhance my life. As I get older, I see the importance of that lesson, especially when I catch myself wishing to be different, to be more of this, or more of that, to look a certain way so I can FINALLY be happy. I often use the coveted and popular Instagram filters to filter my life and pretend my life is a perfect fairytale. But I forget that perfection does not necessarily mean without blemish, or mistakes. To be perfect means to be complete or whole.

Pause.

Think about that.

What if being "perfect" no longer requires you to never make mistakes ever? What if instead it means to seek for things that will complete you, enhance you, and make you whole?

What if social media no longer possessed the defining power of "perfection"? I am here to say that it does not, has not, and never will.

Do not fall victim to the cunning lies of social media. Do not filter your life and hide away behind a screen. Do not let your screen become a mask. Find the beauty in your life. Enhance it. And in that way become "perfected".