Against Perfection, Toward Becoming

✨ Mantra
You do not have to be perfect to pursue what calls you.

🌿 Central Thought
Every semester, I have the profound honor of working with students who are, in quantifiable terms, among the best of the best. They’ve earned competitive scholarships. Graduated at or near the top of their class. Scored in the highest percentiles on standardized exams. And now, they are in college—still fighting. Still grinding. Still carrying the pressure to be exceptional in every class, on every test, in every interview.

There are endless resources telling students to be perfect. To outperform. To stand out. But few resources tell the truth: that the burden of perfection has never been equitably distributed.

So every semester, I remind my students that many of their peers are not carrying the same weight. Some miss class regularly. Turn in rushed work. Float through the semester with average GPAs and half-formed ideas. And yet, they remain unbothered. Not because they are unbothered people, but because the road ahead of them was already paved. They do not need to be extraordinary. They just need the degree. Their networks will do the rest.

Meanwhile, my students—brilliant, present, exhausted—walk through campus believing that one misstep will undo everything. One B. One late assignment. One missed opportunity. That their dreams will collapse like a house of cards. That their future is always at risk of being revoked.

And this is not just about students.

What they don’t know is that the professionals in front of them—their professors, mentors, advisors—are often just as afraid. We, too, walk around with the haunting sense that we must perform our value, offer alms to the altar of Perfection, or risk being returned to the places we once escaped. There are entire infrastructures that remind us—tenure-track or tenured—that we are always one review, one email with the wrong salutation, one letter on official letterhead away from losing everything.

Many of us are walking around successful and afraid. Accomplished and anxious. Tenured and unfulfilled. Wearing the emblems of perfection while trying to conceal the signs of deep weariness.

We stay late. We say yes. We rewrite what didn’t need rewriting. We try to outwork the haunting. We fear that if we ever stop sprinting, the ground beneath us will open up and return us to the scarcity that made us.

And so I tell my students the truth I am still trying to live:
You do not have to be perfect to be faithful to your calling.
You do not have to be flawless to pursue freedom.

Perfectionism is a false god—partial by design, cruel by intention. It was never meant to save you. Only to discipline you into silence. Into submission. Into burnout.

Your dreams are real. Your becoming is worth the struggle. You have the right to walk toward what calls you—not as someone proven, but as someone becoming.

🌱 Affirmation
I do not have to be flawless to be faithful to what I am called to build.
My importance is not measured by perfection, but by presence, care, and integrity.
I am not one mistake away from vanishing.
I refuse to perform a version of myself for systems that were never made to hold me.
I am not here to impress power—I am here to live with depth, with vision, and with truth.
My becoming is enough. My becoming is sacred.
Even now, I am being shaped by something greater than perfection.