One direction. One step. One answer.

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it. Salvador Dali

I have always thought there was a perfect way of being me. I told myself, 'the problem with me is, I'm just not doing it right. There must be an answer." And so I kept searching for the perfect answer to being me, struggled to meet the criteria of being 'the perfect me'.

It was and is, a great journey. In giving up the need to 'be perfect', I give into the truth of being me. I am perfectly human in all my imperfections. Right now. In this moment. Exactly the way I am.

Last year, while at Super Choices, Thelma Box, the founder of Choices, said to me after I had asked a question, "I experience you as a woman who will never find an answer good enough for her."

What a powerful and restorative insight.

I wanted the perfect answer as to why I was the way I was. I wanted the perfect answer to 'make it all better'.

There is no perfect answer. Just as there is no perfect path to where I want to be. There is only this moment, this path upon which I journey with grace and ease, and sometimes angst and trepidation.

Some time ago, in one of my journeys into self-discovery through therapy, I said to my psychiatrist, "Okay. I get that I'm an experiential learner, but did I have to take such a torturous path to get here? I like where I'm at, but did I have to make it so difficult?"

"There were a thousand paths you could have taken," he replied. "This just happens to be the one you took. End of subject. There is no good, bad or indifferent about your path. It is simply the path you chose to bring you to where you are today."

The path I chose.

Ouch!

Did I really choose an abusive relationship to get here?

Well, if I'm 100% accountable for me, myself and I, I am 100% accountable for the choices I made that brought me here.

Which brings me full-circle. I could not know what I did not know. I could not see what I did not know was there to see.

The choices I made that lead me into that relationship were based on faulty wiring, mis-information and deception. I could not know it until I opened my senses to the truth screaming at me in my face -- I didn't know such pain before that relationship with him. I had never been so desperate I wanted to die. I had never believed I was worth nothing other than the abuse he was dumping on me.

An abuser is like a poison. They fill our minds with mis-belief and we, their willing acolytes, drink of their poison, believing they hold the truth to 'perfect love'.

There is nothing perfectly loving about abuse.

But, we buy into the mis-information, and keep searching for the return of their perfect love -- which was the decpetion in the first place. In denial that what they are doing is hurting us, we begin to believe it is our fault the perfect love of that first encounter is possible to reclaim, if only...

If only we weren't so short, so fat, so thin, so stupid, so naive, so smart, so talkative, so inquisitive, so....

If only we weren't who we are. If only we could be the perfect someone they are looking for, that someone they told us we were when the rosy dawn of happily ever after first appeared upon the horizon of their promise to love us forever and a day.

And so, in our fear that we will never be the perfect someone they are seeking, we fear being perfectly us. We buy into the myth that if we could be the perfect love they seek, our love, our lives, our selves would be the perfection of happily-ever-after in their arms.

Ain't no such thing as perfect love.

Love is.

It is our interpretation of the human condition of love that trips us up. There is only our imperfect interpretation of what we think it is.

And when we're with someone who lives and deceives and abuses, chasing after perfect love becomes perfectly abominable -- and we lose the game as we become a reflection of what we seek.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once quipped, "There is nothing to fear but fear itself."

I was once afraid of losing what I perceived to be, a perfect love.

In giving up my fear of losing it, I have gained a universe of love unending. I have opened myself up to the greatest truth of loving myself for all I'm worth.

In love, I am exactly where I am meant to be in this moment. Everything I have done has brought me here. It is my choice what I do next. There is no perfect step. No perfect answer. No perfect direction.

There are only the choices I make, the steps I take, the direction I choose to go. In my stepping fearlessly into the void of not knowing the perfect answer I surrender and fall in love. Over and over again.

In love, there is only one direction, one step, one answer. To continue to fall in love with all of me and the world around me, moment by moment, step by step.

The question is: Are you willing to let go of seeking the perfect moment, the perfect answer and fall in love with yourself, over and over again?