If you wait til you’re ‘good enough,’ you’ll never even 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.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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