If you must be ‘good enough,’ you’ll never start to be yourself

By David McElroy · June 7, 2015

It’s hard for me to explain “the voice” to anyone, but it’s constantly there.

I’m driving into a parking lot to go to a bookstore. There are half a dozen different routes through the parking lot and I randomly choose one. The harsh voice screams at me.

“You should have turned at the other entrance. You’re wasting time. What’s wrong with you?”

I’m sitting alone in my own home and I have my legs propped up on my own coffee table.

“What are you doing with your feet on the furniture?” the voice snaps in anger, as though to a child.

I’m exhausted and don’t feel like doing anything this particular morning, so I sleep late. But I have trouble sleeping, because the voice is yelling at me.

“Why are you so lazy?” the voice shouts. “I’m disgusted with you. Get up. You are lazy.”

In big ways and small ways, the voice is with me much of the time. When I eat poorly and I’m “self-medicating” with sugar, the voice attacks me. It viciously points out the weight I’m gaining. It reminds me that no one likes a fat man. It reminds me that a woman isn’t going to love me like this, because fat people are disgusting and embarrassing.

The harsh and critical superego inside my head is always there. It’s always telling me that I’m a failure. It’s always telling me that I could do so much more with my life if I would just fix everything about myself. There’s always “one correct way” to the voice. Unless I do things in that one way, I am a failure.

That harsh voice constantly reminds me that I’m not OK — that I’m not good enough.

The voice isn’t quite as strong as it was, but it’s still there. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to say things. Sometimes it just has to make a disgusted sound that goes with a grimace — that sounds like someone fuming in anger — to remind me how imperfect I am.

I’ve mentioned before that people told me for years that I was a perfectionist and I didn’t believe them, because I was confused about what perfectionism meant. A perfectionist would clean his house, I thought. A perfectionist would keep his car clean. A perfectionist would eat well and use all of his time productively. A perfectionist would be perfect.

A perfectionist wouldn’t feel this terrible about himself.

I’ve realized lately just how deep I had fallen into the perfection trap. Not only was I abandoning wide swaths of my life to chaos — simply because I didn’t know how to do those things perfectly — but I was allowing the voice to place the rest of my life on hold, too.

I somehow believed that when I had fixed everything about myself, then I will be worthy of love. Then people would like me. Then I would feel better about my core worth. And then I could finally do the things I want to do. I could make movies or write books or mount photographic exhibitions. I could have a wife who loves me.

But until I’m perfect, I’m too shamefully broken to do anything. That’s what I believed without ever putting it into words.

This belief has real-world consequences. I find myself believing that I can’t do any project — such as make a film — because I’m not going to do it perfectly. Yes, I made a short film 10 years ago, but that was a special case. Making that film was more like a “love letter” for a woman who I wanted to love me and approve of me at the time.

My short film was successful by the standards of small short films. My harsh inner critic has page after page of notes about what’s wrong with it — seriously — but that imperfect short made it into 25 smaller film festivals. It won a few awards. It’s been seen more than 300,000 times on YouTube and Vimeo. (Use the recently posted Vimeo link for better quality.)

But the voice tells me it was just a fluke. Because I am so imperfect, if I make another film, my flaws are sure to come out this time. I’ll be exposed for the artistic fraud that I am. It’s better to constantly delay doing anything than to let people see how imperfect my work is.

That’s what the voice keeps saying.

My fears about being imperfect even affect relationships. For instance, when I was planning to marry a woman seven years ago, one of the things that voice kept whispering to me was that marrying her would let her see just how imperfect I was. I had somehow ended up on a pedestal with her. That’s the way I felt. I felt as though she needed me to be perfect — and I knew I couldn’t be perfect.

I pointed out all my flaws, which she already knew, of course. But the voice kept whispering about how humiliated I would be to marry and then have her be disappointed in me. It was another terror in a toxic stew of fear.

I don’t know why I have been able to see this so clearly lately, but I’ve picked a place to start being OK with being imperfect. I don’t know how well it will work.

Late last year, I had started shedding some of my excess weight and I was happier with the way I looked. I dropped 40 pounds, because I started believing I could be happy again.

And then I ended up right back where I had been. I started eating again and regained all the weight I had gotten rid of. So I had to pull out of the closet the “fat clothes” that I had put away in hopes of never wearing them again. And every day, I look at myself and tell myself how terrible I look at this size. I need new clothes, but I refuse to accept anything about myself at this size, so I have refused to buy anything new.

As a first little experiment, I am going to try to accept myself — and like myself — as somebody who weighs a lot more than I’d like to. I have the voice quieted enough — at least for now, at least for this subject — that I’m going to give myself permission to accept being comfortable in my own skin, even if I’m bigger than I want to be.

I still know that I would like to get back to the size I was seven years ago, but I’m giving myself permission to like myself. I’m allowing myself to accept what I am for the moment — without beating myself up about it, because that clearly doesn’t work.

I’m never going to be perfect. I’m never going to be “good enough.”

I’m never going to be smart enough or talented enough to achieve all the things I’d like.

I’m never going to be good-looking enough or thin enough to be the ideal size for a woman to think I’m perfect.

I’m never going to be the mainstream financial success who fits in the “right” sort of high-end suburbs with manicured lawns and plastic people — as some have wanted me to be. (If I get wealthy, it will be because I stumbled into it by finding people who happen to want the art I want to make.)

My life is always going to be messy and disorganized at times, because that’s just who I am. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I need to convince the harsh voice to go away and let me believe that I’m worthy of love and belonging — exactly as I am.

Share on Social Networks

I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

Related Posts