you do not have to be good
on surrendering to the tidal wave of life and refusing to give in
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
You have to surrender. Accept defeat. Only then will you end up where you are meant to be.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to be perfect.
Today, I think I finally understood what this poem means to me. We read and hear things and they make sense, but we never fully absorb the message. Whenever I have a hard day or I’m going to do something scary for the first time, I remind myself: You do not have to be good.
I don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to be attractive. I just have to be me.
It is important to establish this as a permanent thought. When I feel myself spiraling, I pause and remind myself — there’s no one I need to impress. I don’t need to justify my existence or prove I’m worthy.
You deserve to be loved simply for being you. You do not have to perform or be “good” to get it.
This calms my anxiety-ridden brain.
I made a mistake. My first instinct is to nail myself to the cross, so to speak, and set myself ablaze. Who am I if I’m not constantly apologizing?
I grew up in a home where mistakes were met with intense shame and the silent treatment. I would be berated and then promptly ignored. I was criticized for doing things and not doing them well enough. This gave me an intense fear of failure.
I would repent and apologize. I would beg for forgiveness. It was implied that my emotions were an inconvenience and that, at minimum, I was an annoyance.
When I make a mistake, I spiral into panic mode. Will they be mad at me forever? Can I fix it? Do they hate me? Am I bad? I deserve whatever punishment they decide. As an adult, I acknowledge the drama of the thought. But my nervous system is constantly activated with this pressure to be good. Because if you’re not good, you will be alone.
I was twelve when I became friendly with humiliation. The boy I liked told me, in front of everyone, “That’s why you’re fat and don’t have a boyfriend.”
And I remember the utter horror I felt. It felt like silence stretched around me and warped itself. My stomach dropped and I felt everyone’s eyes on me. I felt such shame. How dare I think it was any different? Didn’t you know to be fat was to be ugly?
I have had plenty of crushes. Every single time, they just “didn’t like me.” I’ve had friends date them. Or flirt with them. A pattern formed and the message was clear — I wasn’t good enough.
I did try. I didn’t give up hope. I told guys how I felt. And I was denied again and again. It was an equation I couldn’t solve. Oddly, rejection therapy worked in reverse. It just seemed to pull me inward.
The desire eventually fizzled into nothing. I decided that I should learn to be comfortable with the idea of a life alone.
I wasn’t sure what I had done or why I was being punished. My parents withheld affection from me. I floated through life on the fringe of friend groups. Boys didn’t even want me. Why was I cursed? If someone would tell me what was wrong with me, then I could fix it.
At twenty-five, I still feel this way sometimes. I don’t know who or what I belong to. I want to belong to myself. I want to find a community.
Everyone I love will get married and expand their families, and I’ll live a great life — but it will be solitary. I’ll travel, but I’ll do it alone. I’ll try new restaurants and attend concerts by myself. And I’ll send it to people or post it to Facebook. Or I’ll convince myself no one cares anyway, so there’s no reason to share.
And I want to believe that this won’t bother me, but it will. I think I crave companionship because I’m deathly afraid of being forgotten. I’m proud of my life and of myself. I live. But I know no one cares for the career woman. We eventually stop celebrating her milestones. Culturally, it’s just not something of value. Children. Marriage. Those are the celebratory markers of adulthood. When you don’t meet those milestones — am I really a woman? Am I truly an adult? I’m still looking for the answer.
What I do have an answer for: everyone deserves to be loved. Everyone. Appearance should not be a factor. Body count should not be a factor. You don’t need to be anything to receive that love.
You do not deserve to be humiliated for expressing your desire. I know we exist in a world that places thinness and whiteness at the top of the hierarchy. What destroys me are the women that refuse to unlearn this ideal because they benefit from it.
The women that were supposed to love me and care for me going out of their way to remind me of my perceived place — that is soul-crushing. I never cared about a crush. I cared that I was shamed for daring to take up space, especially by women who knew exactly how my pain felt.
Every day, I do my best to make peace with the future. I don’t want to miss out on my life just because I have to do it by myself. I have found the strength needed for it to no longer bother me.
I’ll never stop sharing myself with the world. Sharing my voice. I deserve to be here. I’m not explaining that or building a case to prove it anymore.
I don’t disappear because someone, anyone, denies me love.
I won’t.