Nobody can ever be good enough when perfection is the standard

By David McElroy · April 27, 2022

I don’t know why the image came to my mind while I slept. I hadn’t seen the photo for years, but I immediately knew what it was.

We were somewhere in the Caribbean on a cruise. At sunset one evening, we were on an upper deck enjoying the colors and the wind and the waves. Someone offered to take a photo of us and snapped this impromptu image. And for some reason, my mind brought this old photo to my consciousness while I slept.

As I awakened — with this image burned brightly into my mind — I heard some words very clearly. In my sleepy state, I made a quick note on my iPhone:

“Nobody’s ever good enough if perfection is the standard.”

I knew what it meant. I also knew I would think about it a lot more later. But I felt a sense of peace about it as I went back to sleep. Something in my unconscious was trying — once again — to teach me a lesson. It wasn’t really about her, though. It was about me.

It was about my terror of not being perfect — and about how my fears have affected women who’ve tried to love me.

Gina was smart and beautiful. She was immensely talented — as a singer and actress — and she had a powerful personality that could light up a room. She was a very impressive woman. And she loved me very much. More than I deserved.

But I found reasons not to want her. The story is complicated — with a lot of twists and turns — but I never would really commit to her. And as I woke up last night with this image on my mind, I finally understood why. What’s more, I understood why I had seen this pattern multiple times with women who have loved me and wanted to build a future with me.

I found something wrong with each one of these women. I’m not saying I made things up which weren’t true. Each time it happened, I found the worst of each woman — and I used that accurate imperfection as an excuse about why I couldn’t commit to the woman who was trying to love me.

Each time I’ve done this, I’ve had moments when I realized the folly of what I’d done, but those moments never happened until it was too late for me to change things. I’ve sabotaged my relationships — for the most trivial of reasons at times — and I’ve hurt women who didn’t deserve to have their love rewarded with rejection.

For years, I’ve gone over and over the facts of my various relationships and tried to find a narrative which explained my feelings and my actions. I’ve understood bits and pieces of it, but I’m not entirely sure I was seeing the full truth — until last night when heard these words in my head:

“Nobody’s ever good enough if perfection is the standard.”

It all makes sense. I had to reject these women for their imperfections. Why? Because if I accepted the love of an imperfect woman, I would have to consciously accept how imperfect I am. And accepting myself as an imperfect man is intolerable to a deep part of me which is still terrified of being punished.

Does that mean all these women have been great matches for me when I’ve pushed them away? Not necessarily. Some of them would have been good matches. Others wouldn’t have been. It’s a mixed bag. But the truth is that I couldn’t allow myself to make an emotionally healthy decision about each one on her merits — because I was unconsciously hung up on facing my own imperfections.

I’ve known bits and pieces of this story, but it somehow made sense in a more powerful way last night. When I saw that old snapshot of Gina and me, I realized that I wasn’t fair to her — which I figured out long ago — but I also realized that I wasn’t fair to myself.

On a conscious level, I’ve always accepted that I’m not perfect. I know that nobody can be perfect. But my old programming — driven by a narcissistic father who never intended to damage me — leaves me struggling with those old fears of being punished for making mistakes.

My realization last night certainly wasn’t about any desire to reconnect with Gina. It’s more about understanding why I made the mistakes I made — with her and with others — and it’s about continuing to grow and change in ways that can allow me to make healthier decisions next time.

I’m never going to be perfect. Whoever is “the right partner” for me won’t be perfect, either. But I can’t accept her as imperfect without fully embracing my own imperfection.

I can’t do anything about the mistakes I’ve made, but I hope I’m constantly becoming a little wiser and a little smarter about how to make better decisions next time.

Life is complicated — and we all appear to be our own worst enemies at times.

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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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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