For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be perfect.
I have never been good at believing in myself, something which everyone who knows me can likely attest to. I am constantly critiquing my own work, even my largest successes. I am quick to downplay my skills and knowledge with qualifiers like “I think” and “I’m pretty sure” and “maybe.” In short, I am my own worst enemy.
Time and time again, I have failed to achieve my own impossibly high standards. I have said the wrong thing at the wrong time; made decisions which I later regretted; stumbled and picked myself back up and tried to remain positive. Things have not gone according to plan, plans have changed, and many times this is for the best. Other times it is deeply, deeply disappointing.
With each imperfection, I remind myself that this is a natural part of life. Despite our best efforts, nothing and no one is ever truly perfect, which is something we are constantly reminded of. There will always be mistakes. Circumstances are often out of our control, as are the many people who do not behave the way we wish they would. Human existence has no shortage of catastrophes and small hiccups, and all of these hurdles have a tendency to make us feel like we have missed the mark. We fear that we have done something wrong and are permanently flawed or scarred because of it. Everyone around us can tell and they will never forgive us; there is path to redemption.
Obviously, this is almost never true.
Nowhere is my own chronic perfectionism more potent than in my lifelong passion for baking. My parents have an old video of me rolling cookie dough at the age of 5 in which I smile wide and exclaim to the camera, “I want to do it all by myself!” In my high school days I graduated to peddling cupcakes around my hometown with a couple of friends, and setting up shop at various town fundraisers and events. In the last few years I began baking and selling custom cakes, each time finding myself in a spiral of self doubt. Even when every detail and flavor went according to my vision, it always felt like something was off. My creations consistently flaunted the slightest imperfections; in my own harsh opinion, they were never quite good enough.
I attribute much of this to the nature of baking, which is widely known as an art (and a science) of precision. 100 grams of this, 50 ounces of that — follow the instructions and you will pull a gorgeous, delicious cake from the oven. It will have no cracks and will not stick to the sides of the pan and all of your wildest dreams will come true. You will be happy forever. Congratulations!
Of course, anyone who has ever baked a cake knows that this is simply not the case. There are good days and bad days, as with any fundamentally human pursuit. It will be humid and your oven will be a few degrees off. The butter will be slightly too warm and you will mix the batter for just a few extra seconds and the whole thing might collapse. You will open the oven door expecting to see something beautiful, and instead you will see a horrific, oozing mess.
At this point, maybe you will throw in the towel. You will decide that you were never that good at baking, anyway. Who did you think you were, trying to make a pavlova and a three layer cake and kouign-amann in your pathetic little home kitchen? You should have known better — in fact, you probably shouldn’t have even tried in the first place.
If you are a self taught baker like I am, then you might also be kicking yourself for your own mediocre training. You will think that you should have paid a large sum of money for culinary school, or trained under some great pastry chef in a big, dramatic restaurant kitchen. You could have gone to France to study viennoiserie and done a summer in San Francisco before trying to make sourdough on your own. You have only yourself to blame for your elementary knowledge.
But then, if you are as stubborn as most creative people are, you will try it again. You will realize that if your loaf came out flat, it probably just needed a little bit more time to rise. Maybe the oven didn’t have enough steam, so you let the covered dutch oven preheat a bit longer, and your score the dough slightly deeper because last time the crust burst and formed a weird little bubble at the bottom. I like to believe there is also quite a bit of intuition at play here, and trusting your gut can be a good lesson to practice.
So, you pick yourself up and dust off your wooden spoon and you take a deep breath. You remember that it’s just flour and water and heat. This is not the end of the world. In fact, it’s just a loaf of bread.
In my relentless quest to be completely and totally flawless, what I have found instead is that there is so much beauty that lies in our imperfections. A sunken coffee cake once became a delightful treat for my upstairs neighbors — “Dude what are you talking about?” they told me. “The flavors are spot on.” — and a too-dense buckwheat loaf can easily turn into croutons for a caesar salad. Over baked brownies are delightful when churned into ice cream, and someone is almost always willing to eat a gooey spoonful of sweet, unset pastry cream.
That being said, there is not always such a nice redemption story. Sometimes a loss is simply a loss, and that’s what trashcans and compost bins and garbage disposals are for. It’s also what long walks and loud music are for, and I think we could all be a little more comfortable with leaning on both; the losses will not stop coming, all we can do is continue to get better at surviving them.
At the risk of being too overtly philosophical, there is a much larger life lesson to be found here; one which we are often quick to forget. No one — and I mean really, truly no one — is perfect. We are all carrying our own flaws, scrapes, bruises, and tendencies. We have all made mistakes and we will all make more, and the best we can do is forgive ourselves and each other. If we are lucky, there will be another birthday and a new cake to bake. We can only hope that this one will turn out a little bit better than the last.
Of course, the frosting might not be thick enough and the layers not exactly even, but it will taste pretty good regardless. And if it doesn’t, you can almost definitely buy a new one at the store. Your friends won’t hate you for this, and if they do then you probably need new friends.
Instead, everyone will probably laugh and pat you on the back and tell you better luck next time. They will love you and all of your fatal flaws and quirks and imperfections, and hopefully you will learn to love yourself, too.