We are all blooper chocolates.

Blooper chocolates are described by Russell Stover as “Less than perfect looking. Same great taste.” Somewhere in the manufacturing process, they ended up with an oops. Either, the cream is leaking out or the top coat is scratched or two are stuck together or they are the wrong size etc. Something happened, and Russell Stover decided they couldn’t sell these particular pieces of chocolate in their fancy, regular boxes.

So, they ended up set aside in a hodge podge pile with other bloopers. These bloopers are then sold unorganized, unlabeled in a box of just bloopers for a lower price per ounce. These poor chocolates didn’t live up to society’s standards of a perfect piece of chocolate, so they go on to live a different life.

A friend of mine mailed me a box of blooper chocolates for my birthday this year. And honestly, I loved it. It is better than a traditional box of chocolates in many ways: 1) You get more chocolate in the box 2) for a cheaper price. 3) And the imperfections are kind of hilarious.

Sure, there’s no label, so you never quite know what you’re biting into, but isn’t life about being like a mysterious box of chocolates because you never know what you’ll get?

Maybe I’m thinking too much about a box of chocolates, but I had two main observations while enjoying them so far. The first is that a lot of the chocolates looked fine to me. I didn’t notice any imperfections. Yet, someone saw an imperfection and set them aside. Difference in scrutiny, perhaps? The second is that whether perfect-looking or obviously a blooper, no matter where on this subjective scale, so far all of the chocolates have tasted amazing. I mean, it’s chocolate. It’s hard to go wrong.

So, to conclude this corny, extended metaphor, I would like you to think of yourself as a piece of blooper chocolate. We are all blooper chocolates.

Some may see imperfections in the way we look; that someone may be ourselves. Others won’t notice a thing and will be instead focused on how awesome we are. Often, societal norms will pressure us to look a certain way, lest we be seen as messed up somehow. Yet, at the end of the day, we are all still awesome, inside and out.

We are all still chocolate. And perhaps that is all we should aspire to be.

Morgan