On Not Being Good Enough
6 min read
In 1899, in the city of Buenos Aires, a boy was born. He was a shy boy who gradually overcame his shyness through writing fiction, being inspired by the stories of Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn. To earn his living, he took a major post in 1938 at a Buenos Aires library. He remained there for nine unhappy years.
In 1938, the year his father died, the boy who was already a man suffered a severe head wound and subsequent blood poisoning, which left him near death, bereft of speech, and fearing for his sanity. At the age of 39, this experience appears to have freed in him the deepest forces of creation. In the next eight years he produced his best work, one that revealed for the first time his entire dreamworld, an ironical or paradoxical version of the real one, with its own language and systems of symbols.
In 1955, he became director of the Argentine National Library. By the late 1950s he had become completely blind, due to a hereditary affliction that had also attacked his father and had progressively diminished his own eyesight from the 1920s onward. It had forced him to abandon the writing of long texts and to begin dictating (mostly poems) to his mother or to secretaries or friends. He later hinted on the irony and the timing of his blindness:
“No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and night at one touch.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
His name was Jorge Luis Borges and his work became an important part of the classics of the 20th century. But he only got the popular acclaim in the 1960’s when he was older and already blind. He was even compared to the great Franz Kafka due to their similar styles. He was a troubled individual, and he often criticized his own work, feeling that it wasn’t good enough and that “he’d better be a man of action”.
He once wrote, “as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action.”
At the same time he was very distressed at never receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, even though he received multiple awards like The National Prize For Literature, Prix International, Jerusalem Prize, and “the prize” of being well-known internationally and appreciated by his readers. Still, he never seemed to be at peace with himself. These conflicting moods of his self are greatly captured in one of his quotes:
“Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.”
He also thought it took him a whole life to learn to write:
“To reach the point of writing in a more or less uncluttered manner, a more or less decorous manner, I’ve had to reach the age of seventy.”
He often reflected on his legacy and what it would turn out to be:
“The image that I shall leave when I’m dead — we’ve already said that this is part of a poet’s works — and maybe the most important — I don’t know exactly what it will be, I don’t know if I’ll be viewed with indulgence, with indifference, or with hostility. Of course, that’s of little importance to me now; what does matter to me is not what I’ve written but what I am writing and what I’m going to write. And I think this is how every writer feels. Alfonso Reyes said that one published what he had written in order to avoid spending his life correcting it: one publishes a book in order to leave it behind, one publishes a book in order to forget it.”
In the eyes of many, he was a success, yet he was still thinking about “succeeding some day”:
“I believe one must not lose hope after fifty years. Besides, one learns by hard knocks, isn’t that so? I think I’ve committed all the literary errors possible and that this fact will allow me to succeed some day.”
These feelings are common among writers and other creative people, and it comes in different forms. Most of the times, it makes us procrastinate, and it causes us to invent reasons of why we shouldn’t do what we ought to, and it makes us question why we “aren’t good enough yet”.
Why do we think so and are we justified in thinking these thoughts?
“I’m not good enough yet”
This is the most common reason I’ve personally struggled in the past and the main reason I’m still struggling now.
Not good enough. What is “enough” though? How do you know when you reach that enough? What if you already surpassed the imaginary enough and you keep pushing that threshold without even noticing, and thus you’re in the middle of a negative cycle where you’re never satisfied or you never start anything because you think you’re not good enough?
And who is to say that there is another way? I don’t think there is. I think, for the most of us, not being good enough while pursuing something we want to do is the norm, not the exception. We create something and we indeed are not good enough until eventually, by the sheer number of hours and days and months and years we put into it, we become “good enough”. But the irony is, by that time we’ll have another level of “not good enough” so we’ll never feel that final satisfaction, that deep sigh of closure, that nirvana.
Listen, don’t bullshit yourself. If you were honest — no, brutally honest with yourself, you would admit right here and now why you delay doing what is meaningful to you. You avoid it because it’s hard. You avoid it because you’re unsure, you’re afraid that your best is not that good yet. And you know what, you’re probably right, you’re not that good yet. You’re not that good because you’re afraid of not being good. You’re afraid you’ll “damage” your image, you’re afraid to experiment because it’s uncomfortable — it’s much easier to do the same things you’ve been doing because let’s face it, there’s no risk in keeping things the same, right?
Well, you’re wrong, the risk is always there. No one is truly insured in this life. You could die tomorrow; you could die in 50 years — you cannot know. And you’ll have regrets, like all of us. And I don’t know about you, but my biggest fear in life is having regrets that are so deeply sealed in my soul that I cannot bear living anymore. These kind of regrets only come from the things you wish you had done and never did, when you haven’t really tried, because you thought you were not good enough.
You know, maybe feeling not good enough is part of our human existence, maybe it’s the itch that pushes us to do great things.
Maybe it is the only way, while the rest is out of your control. Maybe your doubts and misfortunes are the fuel you use to keep on living.
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva. The burial was preceded by a speech by Pastor de Montmollin, who preached that “Borges was a man who had unceasingly searched for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of things.”
He concluded, however, that no man is capable to reach that word through his own effort, and in trying to do so he becomes lost: “It is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to him.”
I believe his mistake was that he resisted his own self for so long. But maybe it wasn’t a mistake, maybe the doubt and the anxiety made Borges great in the first place. Maybe the “final meaning of things” was to accept that he was, after all, good enough.
“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”