{"id":20753,"date":"2015-06-07T23:23:51","date_gmt":"2015-06-08T04:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidmcelroy.org\/?p=20753"},"modified":"2026-02-24T17:19:57","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T23:19:57","slug":"if-you-wait-til-youre-good-enough-youll-never-even-start-to-be-yourself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=20753","title":{"rendered":"If you must be \u2018good enough,\u2019 you\u2019ll never start to be yourself"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Not<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s hard for me to explain “the voice” to anyone, but it’s constantly there.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“You should have turned at the other entrance. You’re wasting time. What’s wrong with you?”<\/p>\n

I’m sitting alone in my own home and I have my legs propped up on my own coffee table.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

“Why are you so lazy?” the voice shouts. “I’m disgusted with you. Get up. You are lazy<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. There’s always “one correct way” to the voice. Unless I do things in that one way, I am a failure.<\/p>\n

That harsh voice constantly reminds me that I’m not OK — that I’m not good enough<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A perfectionist wouldn’t feel this terrible about himself.<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I somehow believed that when I had fixed everything about myself, then<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

But until I\u2019m perfect, I\u2019m too shamefully broken to do anything. That’s what I believed without ever putting it into words.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> and Vimeo<\/a>. (Use the recently posted Vimeo link for better quality.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

That’s what the voice keeps saying.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I’m never going to be perfect. I’m never going to be “good enough.”<\/p>\n

I’m never going to be smart enough or talented enough to achieve all the things I’d like.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. Keep Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20753","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1x9iR-5oJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20753"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38642,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20753\/revisions\/38642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}