We live with a strange and beautiful paradox.

On the one hand, you are exactly who and what you are—the sum total of all the moments, all the decisions, all the ups, all the downs, and all the experiences that have led you to this exact moment in time. In that sense, you could not possibly be anyone else.

But, on the other hand, can you attain perfection? Definitely not. None of us can. We carry our blemishes, our pain, our achievements, we fall, and we bear our scars.

For centuries, we’ve been conditioned to see this tension between our fixed identity and our flawed nature as a problem to be solved. We’re taught or we adapt to a world that has normalised the hiding of our blemishes, the exaggeration and fixing of our weaknesses, and striving for an impossible ideal of perfection that always lies just out of reach.

But what if we’ve been looking at it all wrong? What if our imperfections aren’t just glitches in our system, but among the most important aspects of our very design?