By Colleen Akkerman

I am a habitual user of the Madison Public Library system due to the fact that I love to read books, lots of books…books of all kinds…my favorite being historical fiction and mysteries. Anytime a word is used that I am not familiar with, I look up its meaning. Words have great value…they’re foundational tools for communication, they contain ideas that can influence our perceptions, they can bridge understanding, they carry energetic frequencies, and so much more.

Recently, a friend brought my attention to the word “flawsome”, and I decided to check it out. This word is a combination of two words…flaw and awesome. I found out there is actually a term for the exercise of blending two or more words together, and it’s called “portmanteau”.

A few familiar examples of portmanteaus are brunch (breakfast and lunch), email (electronic and mail), hangry (hungry and angry or irritable), spork (spoon and fork), sitcom (situational and comedy) and guesstimate (guess and estimate). There are a lot of these word combinations, and if you feel real creative, I’m sure you can come up with some good ones of your own!

The Urban dictionary describes flawsome as “something that is totally awesome, but not without its flaws”.

Checking into it further, I found that it was originally coined by supermodel Tyra Banks, and describes an individual who embraces their flaws, and knows they are awesome regardless.

She popularized the term, encouraging us to embrace our imperfections as unique, beautiful and powerful, thus promoting self-acceptance. She thinks we should celebrate our individuality and embrace our imperfections rather than hiding them. It’s what makes us, us! I think she is right!

Many of us go around trying hard to get everything right and trying to hide what we think of as our own inadequacies. Trying to be perfect and flawless, is exhausting and I would say impossible. Good grief, doesn’t that sound tiring?

Besides, how could we ever expect to be perfect, even though many of us have the desire to be so. Here on this physical plane of duality, imperfection rules! In case you haven’t noticed, we live in an imperfect world. Yup, here we are on the physical plane, living life and doing the best we can. I want to point out, that on some level of our Being, we do know perfection. We came from the Monad (our Father in Heaven), where ALL is perfection. On this plane, we are perfect, whole and complete!!! Maybe that is why some of us have the desire for perfection down here on the physical plane.

So, I say, let’s use this word FLAWSOME, and the meaning behind it, to remind us that we don’t have to be perfect to be amazing. We don’t have to be flawless to be awesome. We are all amazing and wonderful and awesome and beautiful, not despite our flaws, but because of them. Can you get behind that? Do you like that idea? It feels liberating, doesn’t it?

Let’s be okay not being perfect. Let’s accept ourselves, flaws and all. Let’s embrace the wholeness of who we are. Let’s be perfectly imperfect!

Truly, no one is flawless…yet we are all flawsome!

Knowing we are imperfect and loving ourselves anyway, knowing we are worthy of love no matter what – that is what I call Magical!!!