Hi! My Name is (Fill-in-the-Blank) 

and My Goal is to Become Mediocre!

Yeah, that's not quite what I meant.

Growing up, I was always reminded to strive for perfection, to aspire only to become the best.  My teachers insisted upon it.  My parents demanded it.  If it wasn't the limit of creativity and intelligence, then it wasn't considered worthy of my efforts.

Perfection.  
I just couldn't get there in a way that satisfied anyone, least of all myself.  
No matter how hard I tried.  
No matter what I did.  
I just couldn't get there.  

Perhaps, deep in my heart, I truly knew all along that I didn't want perfection, that I didn't need to do everything to an exacting standard.  It wasn't that I didn't care about the outcome of my most outstanding efforts.  I cared.  I cared a lot.  I still do.  And I do want to do my best.....but I just can't always be precise, it's not in my nature.

Human beings are incapable of perfection; that is God's job description.

I don't know precisely when I realized it because the process what such a slow one but one day I said, "what I really want is simply to be myself, and that is Good Enough."  Accepting who you really are is the first step on the road to becoming what you are meant to be.  I want to be at peace with myself and with the rest of the world, comfortable in my own skin, becoming more of the good things that only I can become.  

That is the job description that God has for each of us:  to love ourselves as well as being loving to others.

Someone once gave me a T-shirt that had an incredibly ugly cat cartoon on it, and the caption under the cat said,

I am me. 

I am just me.

I'm a little bit like other cats.

But mostly I'm just me.

I did not like that T-shirt (no cat deserves to be made to look like that one did) but I wore it until it fell to shreds.  (Hey, it was a freebie--that's what you do with freebies!)  But the point is that I loved what it said.  It was true then.  And it's true now, and it describes me to a T.....maybe that's why they made into a T-shirt.  (Yeah, I know, I'm being punny--get over it.)  

Mostly I'm just me. Good Enough.  Really, truly.  And that isn't mediocre at all.