How I Went from Flawed and Fabulous: My Journey to Wholeness

Issue 102. December 6, 2024 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

What if I told you that I spent most of my life afraid—without even realizing it? 

I was mainly afraid of being judged by other people, and perhaps rejected or abandoned. But I’ve discovered something that changed my perspective: I am flawed—and that’s awesome. I call it being flawesome.

One way I tried to avoid judgment was by acting like I could afford things that really weren’t in my budget. As a result I ended up wracking up a bunch of credit card debt. By the time my student loans came due in 1999, I was unable to handle all that debt and ended up declaring bankruptcy.

What’s interesting is that I didn’t even realize I was mired in fear.  I always felt like a powerful woman of agency. I wasn’t afraid to go out alone at night like many women. Going through the 12-steps of recovery showed me that I was riddled with fear and many of my actions and decisions were motivated by fear. Specifically, they were to avoid being judged, abandoned and rejected.

I’m not a perfectionist, but I definitely had perfectionistic tendencies. One area where that became evident as I was doing the 12 steps was while journaling. Even though I never go back to and read my journals, and no one else ever reads them I didn’t allow myself to make errors while journaling. I’d stop and make corrections to spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization. If I wrote “shed” instead of “she’d” I wouldn’t allow that to stand as is, I had to correct it!

I can see now that I had this idea, buried deeply in my subconscious, that I shouldn’t have flaws. I’m not sure how I internalized that idea, but it became clear to me as I got farther into 12 step recovery that I believed I was supposed to have answers, know the right thing to say and not make mistakes. Of course, I’m a human being who has flaws, so I tried to hide them and keep them secret. On some level I sort of hated myself for having flaws (or at least I hated my flaws). That is, I judged myself for being flawed.

Truth be told, I was also judging all of you and the world for being flawed too! I wanted the world to be different than it was. That pertained to things like traffic, the education system, the people around me,  and other things that weren’t working the way I wanted them to. That meant I was pissed off much of time.

As a result, created a whole bunch of different facades to hide behind in an effort to avoid being judged, rejected or abandoned. Creating all those facades caused me to become fragmented. To be sure, there were other things that contributed to my fragmentation as well (e.g., being dishonest). Recovery helped me to integrate all of the fragments into a coherent whole and get rid of the fragments that weren’t authentically “me.”

One pivotal shift I made in recovery was coming to understand that I care way more what other people thought of me than what I thought of myself. I was willing to wrack up debt because of what others thought of me, but ignored what that debt was doing to me. Until I couldn’t anymore when the student loans came due. 

I eventually came to care more what I think of me than what others do. This  does not mean I don’t care at all what other think. It means I’m no longer willing to put myself in harm’s way or to compromise my integrity. I want people’s approval, but I don’t need it the way I used to. This change has been at the core of my ability to build and maintain healthy boundaries: I’m way more focused on what I think of myself than what others think of me.

One concept in particular helped me enormously on my journey from fragmented to whole, which is the concept of being

FLAWESOME

Being flawesome means that we are both flawed and awesome. They’re not mutually exclusive concepts. We’re flawed in our awesomeness and we’re awesome in our flawedness. The idea that you’re either flawed or awesome but can’t be both is the epitome of black and white thinking. 

Part of what makes me a unique person is my flaws. If I didn’t have these flaws, I would never have my made my way into recovery, achieved the deep and profound life changes and become a podcaster, coaching and speaker. Now I’m grateful for my flaws.

That was definitely not the case in the past! I was a very defensive person because I didn’t want people to see behind my facades. For example, if someone pointed out a flaw like when I made a mistake, I’d act like I didn’t make a mistake (which is ridiculous). I’d deny or distract as a way to take attention away from the mistake.

I didn’t know what I was doing that at the time, I can only see it in retrospect. Now when I make a mistake, even if it’s in public, I say, “Oops!”  which is a pretty dramatic shift. Saying “ oops” acknowledges my mistake, but it’s lighthearted. It’s not, “Oh my God!! I can’t believe I did that!! They’re gonna think I’m an idiot!!”

So I love this word flawesome and think of it frequently, especially when coaching clients. It’s perfectly normal to be flawed. It doesn’t mean that you’re not awesome. It’s a great concept for people who have grandiose thinking and for people who think they’re the worst pieces of shit that ever walked the planet. It moves us out of the black and white thinking into both/and thinking. 

Now when I’m journaling and make a mistake, I let it go. I sometimes also giggle at the freedom I feel from allowing myself to make a mistake on something that really doesn’t matter. I also sometimes send emails and create social media posts that aren’t capitalized or don’t have proper grammar. It feels freeing to allow myself to relax in my life and embody the fact that I am flawesome. 

So let’s stop striving for perfection. Let’s be flawesome together. I challenge you to say “Oops!” out loud to yourself the next time you make a mistake. Let me know when that happens and what it does for you. Drop me an email here.