I went on a journey to ‘deconstruct’ everything I knew.

Deconstruction is the phase in psychology that comes right after construction. It’s the phase when everything you thought you knew is in question. Nothing’s off the table, and you consider throwing everything away. You’ve had enough. The strongholds of your construction phase of life that were set up to give you freedom, have now become chains as you’re trying to understand your changing role in the world, but still holding firmly onto things you thought you once knew.

It can be kind of a scary phase. I heard rapper, Andy Mineo, describe it like this:

“The scary thing about deconstruction is that, you don’t know if at the end of it you’ll be left with anything at all.”

Kanye West has a song titled, ‘Ghost Town.’ There’s a lyric in it that says:

“I put my hand on a stove,

to see if I still bleed,

and nothing hurts anymore,

I feel kinda free.”

When you’re in that phase where you’ve just been hurting so much, and you start feeling numb, you just want to feel something. Sometimes you go against what you knew. You ‘put your hand on a stove’ just to see if you still feel anything at all. There’s pain in that numbness, but I guess a freedom too. There’s freedom when you get so low that you have no choice but to finally face all the things you’re afraid of.

When you live in fear of not being perfect, this is a hard phase to experience. For me, I wouldn’t let myself go here until I felt completely broken down. I had to hit a wall, and hit it full force, before I could even begin to think, hmm… maybe I need to change some things. Better yet, hey maybe I’m allowed to change some things. Maybe I’m allowed to fail. Maybe I can give myself grace for mistakes.

What would happen if I stopped trying…

to be…

so…

perfect?