If you have read my previous article, you may remember that loving and respecting yourself was one of my four paths to optimism and happiness. But I’ve noticed a recent Internet trend that dangerously misinterprets this idea of loving yourself unconditionally. Some people seem to believe that positive body image means loving yourself despite your flaws because you are perfect the way you are. Now, before I turn into that crotchety old man that popped your balloon when you were a kid and told you that you would never become president, let me tell you a story.

In my freshman year of college, I joined my school’s chorus group called the University Singers. This story takes place at one of our church concerts during their Sunday morning service. I was standing in the back row of the stage, sweating under the heat of the lights while my severely undersized tuxedo jacket and bow tie were collaborating to strangle me to death, when the pastor began his sermon. Now, I always try to keep an open mind during the sermons, but if I was going to be that one sweaty Jewish guy slowly suffocating in the back row while a Jesus rally exploded around me I would not be in for a good time. But this pastor delivered a sermon unlike any other I had ever heard.

He sat down on the edge of the stage and told a story about King David who, under the commandments of God, gave up seven relatives of King Saul for execution to end a blood feud between King Saul’s bloodline and the Gibeonites, which would supposedly end the famine that had been ravaging the land. My favorite part of the sermon came right after the pastor finished the story, at which point he looked up at the congregation and asked them why God would order the execution of seven innocent people. That didn’t sound like something God would do. He then reminded us that no one else was present when King David received these divine orders. Furthermore, these commands turned out to be quite convenient for King David, as King Saul’s bloodline was the only threat to King David’s throne. The pastor concluded that King David had possibly fabricated his dialogue with the Big Man upstairs as a clever pretext to eliminate any potential opposition to his reign. His final words of the sermon were, “Love the Bible enough to question it.” This idea really resonated with me even though I did not even fully understand its meaning at the time. I now realize that this pastor’s message far exceeds the scope of religion; he was trying to teach us that if we really cared about something, we should endure whatever discomfort or pain necessary to completely appreciate and understand it.

Think about a time your parent gave you that annoying line, "This hurts me more than it hurts you." While it may have sounded ridiculous to us as children, we now realize that "tough love" is not always easy for a parent. Yet parents go through the pain of punishing their children because they love their children enough to teach them these lessons that are so uncomfortable to administer.

You must also love yourself enough to question yourself. You do yourself no favors by falling into the body image trap of, "Everyone is perfect the way they are." If we believe that we are perfect the way we are, we have no need for progress and we become complacent. Love yourself enough to recognize your own flaws, and start taking active measures to improve. I struggled with this concept myself throughout most of my childhood. I've always been somewhat overweight but never had the personal conviction to permanently improve my health and physique because I had set up a defense mechanism when I looked in the mirror.

I would focus only on my good qualities and not my bad ones. In my mind, I accepted other qualities I could change and like more and wrote it off as a manifestation of who I was and that wasn't going to change. So because I didn't recognize my flaws or lack of motivation for what they were, I had very little motivation to improve. Whenever I tried to lose weight I did it for some external reason like making my mother happy or getting into the right weight class to play football. It wasn't until senior year of high school that I really looked in the mirror and admitted to myself that I was not actually perfect the way I was. I realized that I actually didn't like the way I looked and I wanted to be better for my own sake, not for anyone else's. And once I started making a conscious effort, I started feeling so much better about myself because, even though I was not yet where I wanted to be, I was moving in the direction I wanted to be. We will never be perfect, but we can identify our fixable qualities and work toward bettering ourselves.

We, as a society, are under the impression that "perfection" is a destination, but we are wrong. "Perfection" is the journey. We are merely human; we are flawed creatures. The best we can possibly do is make our greatest effort to grow and improve. Therefore, perfection is our journey of self-improvement. The first two lines in Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching" echo this idea that true, "destination" perfection cannot ever be reached: "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao // The name that can be named is not the eternal name." In Judaism and Jewish texts, God is always either represented by a specific combination of letters (one such English equivalent would be YHVH,) or a by-name such as "Hashem," meaning, "the Name," because nobody actually knows God's true name. Both this excerpt from the Tao Te Ching and God's "anonymity" in Judaism stem from the idea that we could not possibly know or understand what God or perfection actually is. You can come so close, but the moment you put your finger on it, it's already gone.

So, love yourself enough to be honest with yourself. Remember that at the end of the day, we are all just human, and the best we can do is put one foot in front of the other and just keep on walking.