Being good enough: Shrugging off the tyranny of perfection

I recently published a post – no, I’m not saying which one – which I knew was a bit muddled. I had something to say, and it was timely to say it, but I couldn’t marshal my thoughts to express that something in a sufficiently coherent manner. For weeks it had festered on my To do list. I’d bring out my draft now and then to add bits and chop bits and move bits of it around, but it still wasn’t anywhere near how I’d hoped to get it when the idea had first lodged itself in my mind. It wasn’t so dreadful that I wanted to consign it to the scrap heap, but I had to accept I hadn’t the time or the talent to make it zing. So I clicked on Publish and left it for others to judge its worth.

Do we demonstrate a lack of respect for ourselves and our readers when we send out work we consider below par? Or are we being realistic in recognising we can’t perform at our optimum level all the time? Where do we draw the line between acceptable and sloppy, and how do we recognise such a line when we see it?

We need our standards but, as Emma Darwin points out, too much self-criticism and perfectionism is counter-productive as it stops us even trying to create. Yes, we must kill our darlings, but we mustn’t abort them before they’ve had the chance to see what they might become.

Accepting things as they are isn’t tantamount to passive resignation. It’s not the same as giving up. Yet isn’t it rather grandiose to think we have to get everything right? My blog post, along with the rest of my millions of sentences, is insignificant in the overall scheme of things. Good or bad – the universe doesn’t give a shit.

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I like the way Justine Musk has drawn on the Icarus myth to illustrate how writers need to forge a path between reaching for the scorching heights of the sun and sinking so low our wings become waterlogged and we come crashing down to earth:

When we’re grandiose, we won’t create because we don’t want to destroy our illusions about ourselves; when we’re depressed and despairing, we won’t create because we don’t see the point.  Too close to the sun or too close to the water; too high or too low; neither is the place where we get any work done.

I’ve remarked on the grandiose aspect of creativity in my post on Fiction about writers and writing. The psychoanalyst, Hanna Segal, commenting on William Golding’s novel, The Spire, is sympathetic to the artist’s need to have sufficient self-belief to mitigate the anxiety of the work collapsing. As Sophie Beal points out, when we’re ricocheting between ambition and humility we might not arrive at the position for which we’re aiming, but we might reach a place we’d never dreamt of that works just as well.

As I commented on Emma’s blog, this struggle to find and hold a position about ourselves and our world that is neither unduly pessimistic nor unrealistically grandiose, is at the core of the object relations school of psychoanalysis. The unfortunate wording notwithstanding, the concept of good-enough is one we all recognise, and often features on writers’ blogs. Given the complexity of the path to self-acceptance, it’s useful to remind each other that we’re already there. We don’t have to perform to be good enough, we just have to be:

I’m convinced that the core of everything that is wrong on this planet is people feeling that they are not good enough. But there is nothing to prove. You don’t have to do anything.
interview of Eve Ensler by Decca Aitkenhead

Yet sometimes it’s hard to recognise the truth in this. Some of us need help to overcome our addiction to external validation and praise. The journey to good-enough means there’s always work for therapists, but there’s plenty of inspiration for writers too. My own Icarus story is about a man who can’t bear how closely he’s tied to the earth but, except in his fantasies, hasn’t the wings to even begin to approach the sun. In Search of Mr Right, recently republished by The Journeyman, is a more humorous take on embracing good-enough without settling for second best.

I’ll leave you with a songster’s take on this theme: Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s Dancer with Bruised Knees.

Please share your own thoughts on navigating around perfectionism and despair to reach good-enough. How do you balance this in relation to your own creativity? Has the journey to good-enough inspired any of your writing or been the subject of any of the fiction you’ve read?

I'll be returning with a lighter post on Monday when I'm asking how do you arrange your literary bookshelves? I hope you'll join me.