I was a perfectionist with impossibly high standards. For the longest time, I had this idea in my mind that anything that did not meet my unbelievable standards was not good. My idea of perfection was “perfect,” and I thought that nothing could change that. I was wrong.
When I was 15, my brother Nicholas was diagnosed with autism. The diagnosis was a huge surprise to me. In my admittedly biased mind, Nicholas was an adorable toddler with a very slight delay in communication. Nothing was wrong with him. However, now there were specialists saying that he had a disability. As time wore on and Nicholas started to receive therapy for his autism, I watched his progress. Soon, I started to see what everyone else had seen. The lack of communication, eye contact, and socialization that had originally worried my parents began to worry me.
Though I love him, these small signs that he was not “normal” set my idea of perfection against my baby brother. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to resolve the situation. My heart was telling me that “perfect” did not matter and to focus on my brother, but my head kept telling me that there was something wrong with Nicholas. In a desperate attempt to fix the situation, I did something that shocked me at the time. I sat back and waited. I stopped trying to make all the pieces fit and focused my attention on the needs of my brother. I spent hours on websites about autism and Applied Behavior Analysis, the type of help my brother was getting. I learned how to prompt my baby brother, how to play with him and teach him at the same time, and how to cope with the inevitable screaming fits. Slowly, we added words to his vocabulary, and eventually Nicholas began forming phrases by himself.
Now, two years of therapy and tantrums later, Nicholas still struggles to communicate, but he has really improved. There are still times when Nicholas has a thought that he wants to express but has trouble voicing; nonetheless, he continues to stumble through the words until someone comprehends what he is saying. The phrases are disjointed and out of order, and sometimes the verbs are in the wrong tense, but in the end someone understands. However, the experience was a battle between my idea of perfection and my view of my brother.
It turned out that trying to wrap my brain around the fact that Nicholas did not fit into my idea of “perfect” was like trying to drill through a concrete wall with a plastic spoon. Stepping back allowed me to focus on one bit of my problem at a time. The difficulties that Nicholas had made up my wall and the ground on which it stood was the perfection I strive to achieve. H
However, his mischievous smile, the look of pure joy on his face when someone understands him, and those little phrases he walks around the house repeating made up my spoon. There was no way that my plastic spoon could completely eliminate this concrete wall, but there was something else that I could do. Over the two years, I slowly dug away at the ground, the perfection, beneath my wall. Very slowly the wall became less steady. I do not know exactly when, but my precious spoon changed my “perfect” ground and the wall fell. By focusing on what is unique about my brother, I solved my own problem, and I also managed to change “perfect” into perfect. “Perfect” means without flaws. However, I learned that perfection is acceptance of every aspect of a person.
Before Nicholas, I was good at being tolerant of other people’s differences. It was after Nicholas that I began to clearly see the difference between tolerance and acceptance. My baby brother taught me that there is more joy to be found in embracing the diversity in individuals than in searching for “perfection.”
Bergman won the West Windsor Police Benevolent Association scholarship at High School North’s awards night. She will attend the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers in the fall.
