What You Learn About Having Character Flaws As You Get Older

They say that life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself. That’s a pretty good principle to live by if you ask me because it gives us all agency to keep pushing on and moving forward.

That being said, it’s also true that no person on earth is going to get older without any personality flaws or small quirks of character that couldn’t do with improvement. It’s just how humans are, and if you think you’re perfect already, odds are you’re blind to more than you’re letting on. This isn’t supposed to depress you of course, any more than the objective fact that the moon affects the tides of the ocean. I simply feel we should all be mindful of our flaws and commit to working on ourselves. It’s why I’ve had years of therapy, worked through past trauma and feel a stronger person for it.

In fact, the privilege of age means greater life experience and ideally, a deeper sense of understanding who you are.

 

Perfection Was Never Actually The Goal

When we’re young, we often think the goal of life is to eventually become this perfect version of ourselves. We believe that one day, if we just work hard enough, we’ll finally destroy all our flaws and reach some kind of finished state where everything works in harmony, we’re never nervous before a date, we always look chic, and we never let an insult go by without a smart retort. But as we get older, this mindset usually shifts.

You start to realize that nobody actually reaches perfection. Not your boss or colleagues, not your parents, not even celebrities or people who seem to have it all financially! Everyone is just figuring things out as they go along. Perfection isn’t the destination because there isn’t a destination at all. Life is more like an ongoing process of growth and change, and as long as you’re generally moving towards health, happiness and connection, you’re doing it right.

 

Some Flaws Are Actually Strengths In Disguise

As time goes by, you might notice that certain things you always considered flaws actually serve you well in specific situations. Maybe you’ve always thought you talk too much, but that same quality makes you great at building connections and putting others at ease because they feel they can open up and relate to you. Or perhaps you’re too detail-oriented for some tasks (pedantic even), but that is actually pretty useful in your line of work and makes you pay attention to detail and stick to deadlines. Maybe you have a vape and citrus flavoured nic pouches in your bag, but that’s stopped you from your thirty-a-day smoking habit and you’re headed in the right direction. It might mean as a head chef your line cooks don’t enjoy how much of a stickler you can be, but you’ll never ever give someone food poisoning, and that’s worth it. As such, try to see the silver lining, which doesn’t mean you can’t improve, but it does take some of the bite out of your self-criticism.

 

Some Flaws Aren’t Worth Fixing

As you become older you also develop a better sense of which battles are worth fighting. That means learning to be strategic about where you put your energy. Some flaws genuinely cause problems and are worth addressing of course, like a short temper. Others just aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

For example, maybe you’ve always wanted to be more organized, but your creative, somewhat chaotic approach to life actually works for you or perhaps you wish you were more outgoing, but you’ve built a fulfilling life that suits your more introverted nature and are surrounded by people just like you. That’s fine.

I think the greatest gift of growing older is understanding yourself, your boundaries and what makes you happy. I don’t want my children to have a perfectionism complex, I want them to know that having flaws is part of being human.