I just finished watching Julie & Julia.  If you’re a movie watching person and you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.  I think it’s a new favorite.  The movie, which simultaneously offers glimpses into the lives of Julia Child and Julie Powell, has me reflecting on many things — passion, connection, depression, feeling lost, being saved, saving yourself, joy, relationships, love, and yes, food.

My parents let me have a TV in my room for about six months when I was a kid.  I believe I was in fourth grade.  It was a little black and white TV with the two different knobs for changing the channels.  The only channel it picked up was PBS, and one of my favorite things to do on the weekends was watch cooking shows on PBS.  Justin Wilson and, you guessed it — Julia Child.  I thought she was really something.  Even now — nearly 20 years later — I still remember her telling me if I am going to flip something, I need do it with confidence and so what if it goes all over the place.  Now that’s a lesson for life, isn’t it?

I think I connected so deeply with this movie because I experienced a fraction of what Julie Powell experienced.  Julia Child has always meant something to me.  Her way of being left an impression on me as a kid.  She was brazen, fiery, independent and adventurous — things I strive to be to this day.  She was a role model.  For Julie, she was a sort of savior.  Neither one of us knew Julia.  Neither my role model nor Julie’s savior was the real Julia Child.  But each of us created an idea of her inside of us that helped us become better people.

It’s amazing how we do that, as people, isn’t it?  We find some person we don’t actually know — usually a celebrity of some kind — and put them on this pedestal.  They become our role models, our good influences, our “perfect people,” and our saviors.  Since we don’t actually know them, the representation we’ve created inside ourselves become kind of cartoonish.  We might know a handful of things about the person, and they become disproportionate to the truth.  They become our truth about the person, with little basis in reality.  In this way, it is all too easy to allow our favorite musician, actor or author to become “perfect.”  In this way, these people transform from some basically normal person who wrote a book that sold a bunch of copies, for example, into the epitome of human beingness.

We all do it.  There is no shame in it.  It’s natural.  I’m excited to watch as we begin to understand, though, that these “perfect” people are created only because we create them.  And that by creating “perfect” people inside ourselves — people who model good living and even “save” us — we are proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that these “perfect” people actually reside within us.  These creations represent to us who and what and how we strive to be.  We externalize it because we expect those things can never exist within us, or, at the very least, cannot exist without mountains of hard work.  But, by the mere act of externalizing in this way, we illustrate that these things are actually already inside us.

You are your own “perfect” person.  You can put your incredible perfection of human beingness off on someone else if you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s all you.  You are amazing.  Own it.  :D