There is beauty in flaws

In our obsession for perfection, sometimes we forget that flaws can be quite beautiful. If you remember Dirty Dancing, you’ll remember Jennifer Grey played Frances AKA Baby. Apart from no one having the right to put her in a corner, no one had the right to deny that her smoky eyes and nose made her distinctive and actually quite beautiful. Sometime after the movie, she had surgery done to “correct” her nose and it didn’t take her long to realize how big a mistake it had been to agree to said correction.

In interviews, she says that the surgery was one of the biggest mistakes in her life. It was as if she’d lost part of her identity. The same happens with most of us. A lot of people lament their flaws, except that they fail to see that they sometimes define us and that flaws and imperfections are actually a good thing.

Men and women around the world lose sleep and suffer deeply because they want to conquer those flaws. Weight issues, height, hair loss, breast size, cellulite, skin color, eye color and the size of a nose are just some things that cause suffering in people because they wish they could control and conquer these “flaws”.

So that’s when surgery comes in the picture, and Botox, and prostheses, and chemical treatments, and creams, and pretty much anything you can think of in the quest to conquer a flaw. And sure, some people might be happy when they conquer that flaw, though what I’ve often seen is that they move onto something else they’d like to change or that they are not happy with and the pattern repeats over and over. 

That’s because it seems many people confuse the pursuit of happiness with the conquest of a flaw, and as Jennifer Grey found out, sometimes it’s beautiful to be flawed. Because there’s truth in flaws and because perfection is no guarantee of happiness.