When are you good enough?
When he was very young, my older brother used to wake up each morning and vow to start his life over as a new, improved version of himself: Someone kinder, smarter, and more moral. He was so earnest, so sincere, so handsome, so doomed.
What I love about him is how smart he was, even then. No matter how forcefully he declared his intention, no matter how deeply he meant it, he never achieved it. It’s tempting to think that’s because he wasn’t good enough or strong enough or disciplined enough.
But I think the opposite is true. I think that he never became that improved version of himself because he didn’t need to. He already was that. The proof is in the resolution: because he was so moral and so good, he wanted to be better. His desire to start over in order to be a better person was a manifestation of how good he already was, not a deficiency he had.
In some of us, the mind won’t be convinced of this. Instead, it hijacks all that goodness and began to blackmail us with the fear that we’ll never be good enough.
It’s exhausting, being nattered at like that. It’s exhausting to keep working at something that never feels done. Our self-improvement takes on a driven, haunted quality.
When we overuse any strength, it becomes a weakness. Self-improvement can be a fetish, something we just can’t get enough of, even though it never satisfies. Which makes me wonder: Are we being too hard on ourselves? How do you know when you’ve arrived at “good?” How do you know that you left “good” in the first place?