compassion vs. perfection

hello, friends. today i'm offering another essay with tarot spreads as part of five days of offerings, along with a new offer for a brand new upcoming tarot journaling series that i hope will help you show yourself and those around you a bit more compassion, strength, and courage to carry on.

tarot for impossible times officially launches on december 13th, and will also be available for signup anytime after that if it's something you want to check out in the new year or on your own time. however, if you sign up before the official launch on december 13th, you can use the code ITSPOSSIBLE for 15% off.

now, let's talk about compassion, perfection, and impossible standards.

if you only take one thing from today's essay, let it be this: perfection is a myth, y'all.

there is no such thing as a perfect tarot reader, a perfect activist, a perfect queer, a perfect small business owner, a perfect creative, a perfect anticapitalist. we are all broken people struggling in a broken world, and perfect is not a thing that exists.

i have a joke with my wife and some of our close friends, where when someone needs assurance we say, "you're perfect and you've never done anything wrong in your life." it's completely ridiculous and over the top, and never fails to make us all laugh, and i highly recommend trying it out.

much more pleasant, much more enjoyable, to lean into imperfect instead of only valuing things that we deem flawless.

because honestly, who wants perfect anyway? give me tension, friction, texture, cracks, messiness, unexpected or mysterious somethings every day of the week. give me strange, give me weird, give me flaws. i would always rather something be true than insist on a gloss of faux perfection smoothed over the cracks.

but it's easy to get caught up in the (white supremacist) myth of perfection. and these days, when everything feels so deeply fucked up, it's easy to obsess over what isn't perfect instead of paying attention to what is weird but working. it can feel like a more accessible thing to fixate on, trying to make something flawless in private instead of just trying something and potentially failing.

i'll talk about this a bit more in the final essay of this series, but just to plant the bug in your ear in advance: nothing will ever be enough for anything or anyone, and that's actually fine. you cannot do it all, be everything and everywhere, handle everything alone, and still be a functional person. you just can't. it's not a personal failing, it's a reality of the world we live in — and also like, physics. this world, and these vessels we live in, have limits. and when you heap your own impossible expectations and standards on top of it all, you can end up wanting to give up before you even start.

so if we can't strive for perfection, what can we strive for? what is the next best thing — or, perhaps, something even better?

i'm gonna argue that it's far more beneficial, and far more attainable, to strive for compassion instead. and i'm also gonna argue that tarot can really help us build a more compassionate inner voice for ourselves, one reading or question at a time, if we let it.

what is compassion, exactly? sometimes compassion is framed as "empathy towards another person's distress," but i like to think of it more as "sensitivity and concern towards other people." compassion is being aware that other people are also people, and that they may be experiencing something that you don't fully know about or understand. compassion is the recognition that grief and suffering are universal, and the kindness that we extend to others as a response to that recognition.

compassion is something that we often expect (or even demand) from others, but may not always extend back to them as readily. we know all of our own circumstances and challenges intimately, after all, but rarely know everything that someone else is navigating.

"doesn't this person know that i'm doing my best?"

"i can't believe they're speaking to me like this, when i am dealing with so much already!"

"how dare they expect me to take on this additional burden when i'm already barely making it!"

we have all of the context and backstory for our own choices and struggles. but how often do we really know what others are experiencing? how often do we extend grace first, actually treat others as we want to be treated?

i don't think that information is necessary for compassion, though it's easy to get caught up in that idea that if people only knew what we were going through, they would have more patience or generosity or whatever we wish they had. i also don't actually think that true empathy is necessary for compassion either, though again, it's easy to assume that we need to be able to relate to someone's situation to feel something about it.

no, i think that compassion is a choice we make, over and over, to extend humanity to people — even when we don't know the exact details of their circumstances, and even if we can't find a similar experience within our own history.

and the thing is, when we practice choosing to extend compassion to other people and groups on a regular basis, it also makes it a little bit easier to extend compassion to ourselves.

it's this choice aspect that makes all of this so hard. but it's also what makes it possible to learn and intentionally cultivate compassion for the self and for others, bit by bit.

every time i send out my annual reader survey, i get a very specific kind of comment about how i'm a bad anticapitalist because i charge money for goods and services. this isn't new for small business owners, and it's certainly not unique to me, but it's still something worth talking about.

we don't live in a perfect world. and a perfect anticapitalist doesn't exist, because we still live in capitalism, right now. i have to pay rent and buy food with american dollars, just like most people in this country. and i happen to make my money as a small business owner offering spiritual resources and services, which means that like other creatives and spiritual practitioners, i'm also the recipient of a lot of extra, often unfair scrutiny.

sometimes these comments really hit below the belt and hurt my feelings. (if my emails feel like spam to you, or you think i'm trying to run a cult here, just unsubscribe. bless.) but most of the time, i can shrug them off — because the expectation of perfection is so unrealistic that i will lose my mind and quit if i try to hold myself to that standard, to be everything to everyone, or to feel guilty about selling things. i do my best to be generous and honest, to give as much away as i can, to volunteer my time and skills whenever possible and, still, i have to eat. i have to be on platforms and apps that i don't always like. i have to market my shit. i have to work every single day.

the truth is that i can't afford to not sell things, and commerce is not capitalism, and there are always people who will vilify business owners for not living up to their own impossible "ethical" standards. this is simply the reality of the world we live in, even as we work to build a different one.

we could all stand to start first with compassion, rather than with an expectation of perfection. that's not to say that we need to excuse every nazi tattoo or pedophile, that we have to constantly make space for people who want us dead, that we have to bend over backwards to tolerate intolerance. but it is to say that if someone generally aligns with your values and maybe also sometimes makes different choices than you believe you would, that doesn't always make them your enemy.

compassion is an antidote to judgement. it helps us to slow down, to pay attention, to recognize what is pushing our buttons and how those things might be more about us than the other person.

a lot of things suck, even when they try not to. and a lot of things are great, even if they aren't perfect. these realities exist simultaneously, and that's messy. someone can really annoy me and also be right. someone can be thoughtless in one area and profoundly thoughtful in another. someone can be super opinionated about one thing and not give a shit about something else that seems exactly the same from the outside. we are all walking, talking contradictions, and i don't know one single person who has every part of their life figured out.

you could go through life judging everyone for not living their life exactly like you do, i guess. you could use your one wild and precious life to tell everyone you see that they're not doing enough, or they're not doing things correctly. you could spend your energy critiquing and arguing and vilifying anyone who dares to share another perspective or another way forward. you could treat yourself with judgement and callousness, constantly telling yourself that you're worthless or lazy or not doing anything that matters.

or — and hear me out here — you could start with compassion and see where that gets you instead.

perhaps this is the point where you're thinking, what does any of this have to do with tarot, meg? a lot, actually — because reading tarot and working with tarot and studying tarot can help us learn compassion for others, by helping us learn compassion for ourselves.

this doesn't have to be a complicated process. cultivating compassion in your readings really looks like letting yourself slow down, and observe, and listen carefully to what the cards are actually saying — not the worst case scenario, not your deepest fears, but an honest answer to your question.

when we rush, in general and in our tarot readings, compassion is harder to access. we make assumptions, hurry to a decision or an outcome, put pressure on ourselves to perform or achieve in a particular timetable. when we quickly pull cards about a super hard situation but don't give ourselves time to really recognize what's coming through, it can make us feel a hundred times worse, almost like a punishment for even asking. but when we slow down, and give ourselves space to discover potential truths and pathways, we also make room for truth, and clarity, and confidence, and also ease.

conveniently enough, tarot is something that generally benefits from us not rushing. tarot teaches us to take our time, to listen and observe, to pay attention, and to sit in the strangeness of not knowing something.

besides slowing down, i think the easiest way to bring compassion work into your tarot readings is to really acknowledge what you need in the moment that you're grabbing your cards. what are you craving? what fears need soothing? what are you anxious about? how can you choose a tarot spread or write a question that creates space for softness, that puts guardrails around what you receive, that specifically solicits what you're looking for?

if you're exhausted and sad, maybe don't ask your cards "what am i doing wrong?" maybe instead ask "what will help me fill my cup right now?"

if you're angry and craving action, you don't have to ask your cards "how do i get over this?" and could instead ask "what's a productive outlet for my anger?"

if you're frustrated and flailing, avoid a question like "why can't i do anything meaningful?" and instead try something like "what is one solid action i can take right now?"

sometimes we ask really cruel or harsh questions of your cards, and then hurt our own feelings with the readings that emerge. or we ask the cards why we aren't already perfect, and paint any efforts that we're making in the worst possible light.

and y'all, life is hard enough. you don't have to use tarot to punish yourself. practice showing yourself kindness, grace, sweetness, love, and patience by asking questions of your cards that might actually help you feel calm, grounded, supported, or remind you of what you're already doing right.

and if you can't do that, offer yourself compassion in the form of not doing a tarot reading and instead attending to your needs, your tenderness, your emotions.

fuck perfection, fuck impossible standards, fuck being mean to ourselves out of habit or trauma or whatever else is motivating your inner critic. today, and for the rest of this year, and maybe even next year too, i am begging you to learn how to be nice to yourself. i am begging you to learn how to show compassion to others instead of focusing on what they're doing "wrong." i am begging you to move through this world with gentleness when you can, and save your very justified feral rage for the fascists and transphobes and billionaires.

you deserve softness, and so do the people around you. what might that look like? what might that mean? how might that feel? and how might that attitude and approach gradually change you into someone who brings compassion into every conversation, every choice, every action?

thank you, as ever, for being here. i sincerely hope that this essay has offered some food for thought, and i'm sending you a lot of love, gentleness, and courage for the days ahead.

wanna dig more into these ideas of compassion and strength? tarot for impossible times begins on december 13th.