Perfection is a motherfucker.

You can spend all your time searching for it and no matter how hard you try to find it, it will elude you. But the worst part is that while WE KNOW it’s impossible to obtain, every once in a while we let our ego drive the car and shout back from the front seat about how we are the exception to the rule. So we allow ourselves to be sold by the idea that we’re not good enough, that there is an externally driven standard that we need to meet or, simply put, that we’re ugly, stupid, and don’t make enough money to be worthy of love.

Fuck.

And I experience it too. Having spent half my life held up in a gym rockin sweat pants and Chuck Taylors as my work wear and seamlessly transitioning between workouts and coaching without changing out of the sweat ridden mess that I find myself in well, it’s safe to say that I’ve grown to be comfortable with my appearance. But it wasn’t always that way. I was overweight as a kid and picked on for being fat and poor. I’ve battled with depression for the great majority of my life. I’ve been isolated and vulnerable and the pursuit of reaching for someone else’s standard has at times left me empty and shallow and lifeless. But I am also one passionate and stubborn son of a bitch so inevitably I pick myself up and do my best to move forward, headed back toward the cliff that I’ve fallen off so many times before, seeking out that ever elusive state of perfection.

I know a lot of people like this. The gym is an incredibly vulnerable place to be and Crossfit turns that up to a thousand. There’s no way to hide what you’re bad at. No walled off corner for you to discreetly do your own thing for fear of judgment, quite the opposite. Instead there’s half naked fire breathers dropping weights from overhead half of us could only hope to deadlift to the soundtrack of music so loud that it leaves you half deaf until the following morning when you wake up early just to do it all over again.

FITNESS!

But as fun and engaging and even potentially liberating as it can be to shed your clothes and throw down amongst a group of fellow weirdos, we often find our selves in a brand new world of insecurity that looks disturbingly like the one we’ve been running from our whole lives. We get caught up in the same externally driven standards we always have, this time as a consequence of watching top athletes do what they do well, but ever imposed by the same feelings of fear and doubt that have plagued us all along.

And we tend to do this in every aspect of our lives. We’re told that the highest level of formal education is a, if not the most worth while endeavour, to put our self worth in the amount of money we make, that to have a nice ass or big tits or huge muscles is going to make you happy and on and on and on. So in a commendable effort to “have it all” we stretch ourselves so thin that we invariably fall short of the mark everywhere, while still buying into the idea that if you don’t pursue each one of these things at full strength you’re a loser.

I say to hell with all that.

How dare anyone try to dictate the course of your life to the tune of their own drum! How did it ever become commonplace for us to assume that we have to be smart, strong, charming, beautiful and rich when if we really took the time for introspection we’d realize that the pursuit of the thing that brings fire to our lives is a worthwhile endeavour in and of itself? And we know it. Deep down and spoken in hushed corners with close friends that we trust with our deepest and innermost thoughts, we let it out. In our darkest moments when our spirit is broken and where fighting is no longer an option the truth of who we are comes out in all of its beauty. And for a brief moment, we feel like we are connected to something greater. Until it falls away.

But it doesn’t have to.

In the end, we’ll all have a story of how we persevered, overcame, loved and lost or at least took a swing. But from where in your heart will the narrative be spoken? Will it be enough to tell a story of the “everyman” with your name written in the blanks? Or will it flow from the heart of someone who turned his back on his neighbours watching eye and choose his own path? One where he doesn’t have to rationalize the time spent away from the people and things that he loves?

You decide.