This is what keeps me up at night...

Later edit: added just to clarify that this post follows an "in real life" event that I didn't give the background on because I don't have the strength to talk about it directly. At some point I'll probably hash it out in greater detail. 

I have an unwanted identity: an undisciplined, cowardly, selfish, irresponsible, narcissistic, lazy, awkward, and arrogant fool. This was instilled in me while I was very young. My inner critic carries the twisted messages of my childhood forward: manage your life perfectly in all areas through force of will and discipline no matter how miserable or marginalized it makes you feel. If you fail at that, apologize for yourself, but don’t expect the apology to fix anything—you’ll just have to make up for your mistakes by never failing again.  

It is an impossible standard that haunts me and follows me into everything I do. I have a lot of faults, a lot of “bad” things woven into my being. But even as I accept that, I find myself rejecting the notion that I should strive toward some impossible standard in the hopes of “improving” myself and “moving past” those negative facets of myself.

When does it end?

When am I enough? When are any of us enough? How long and through how many lives will we devote ourselves to the task of purging our being of those disagreeable things we hesitate to talk about? What do we hope to accomplish in that pursuit? We acknowledge that perfection is unattainable but hold that we should keep working toward that perfection because…why? Because the “improvements” one makes along the way are valuable? Are they? Or is it just a grand shell game, trading in one flaw for another? How much of ourselves should we be willing to change for the sake of an ideal? When do we stop being ourselves if we do that? Where is the line between self improvement and the destruction of self?

The most powerful thing He ever said to me was “She is not better than you.” I think that’s the only time Set ever shouted at me. The world came crashing down in that moment. The ideal suddenly vanished from reality as I looked around and realized there were no real examples of it. It was suddenly entirely fantasy, abstract and unproven, a thing to be taken on faith alone. And my brother’s voice floated into my mind and I was back in a conversation we had shared once on a long drive.

“Do you know what utopia translates to?” he asked, “It means ‘nowhere’, like it literally says the word means that it describes something which doesn’t exist.”

“Did you make that up?”

“No,” he laughed, “it’s true—or it’s a real footnote in this book anyway.”

It was a philosophy book. I later checked the fact and it is true.

It means more to me now than it did then. Utopia is nowhere and perfection is nothing. I know that intuitively and I know it on a lot of different levels. I could be the best person I know how to be and still hurt people sometimes because I will never be perfect at it. I will never even be near perfect. So why do I strive? If I am not actively destroying the world around me, if I am mostly harmless, why is there such burden to think of myself as “not enough”? Not pious enough, not kind enough, not selfless enough, not honest enough, not industrious enough….on and on. I could fix things until the end of time and never have everything fixed. So what gets priority? Do I decide that or does society decide it? Am I chasing a “higher” version of myself or just the approval of others (who probably have their own agendas to back the priorities they set)? Is there an objectively “right” way to be or is that a matter of societal taste as it evolves through the centuries? Is my generation, the “me generation”, really so bad or are we just nailed (like every generation before us) for being different and changing the status quo?

And even if I’m way off base on that: when do I stop trying to “better” myself and redirect my energy to doing something meaningful as the person I already am? No amount of fixing will make the tasks I aspire to any easier to accomplish. If I hold my tongue every time I fear I might be saying something disagreeable or “wrong” I will never speak. (Or, at least, I will never speak honestly.) If who I am now isn’t good enough, then I’ll never be good enough and to hell with it all anyway.

But it’s easy to say that. It’s harder to commit to it. Because I don’t want to be a “bad person”. Because I don’t want to hurt people. Because most of the time I don’t mind trying and I don’t mind changing if it makes things easier for myself and for others. Because that little voice inside me keeps going back to the beginning and reminding me… undisciplined, cowardly, selfish, irresponsible, narcissistic, lazy, awkward, and arrogant fool. Because there is no shortage of voices out there ready to reaffirm that voice if I don’t conform and submit to the cult of never-good-enough.

And on one level, I know I’m loved in spite of it all. But I don’t always feel like I am. I pull away and slip away and contemplate moving somewhere where no one knows me and trying again to live perfectly. There’s this insidious little whisper inside me that tells me if I can just be perfect then I’ll be loved and feel loved. It’s a damn lie, and I know it is—but sometimes I give into it.

Being is hard.