And Now That You Don't Have to Be Perfect

It's a saying which I've seen a few times, most recently on Pinterest. "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good." Attributable to John Steinbeck, whose work I've never particularly favored. No one reads this, which is actually quite freeing, I can say anything. It becomes a record just for me rather than, in part, the newest attempt to maintain a sense of connection that perhaps inevitably fails. There have been a lot of failures of late, and I'm thinking that it isn't the being wrong that's hard about that, it's the inability to separate making errors from being a mistake. But if no one's watching, if the things I do don't matter to anyone but me and if I don't really matter that much, then who do I have to be perfect for? Who do I even have to be good enough for?

I killed the basil plant, my favorite plant. I got overzealous and I put it in the greenhouse and I left it there overnight with the newly-seeded Snapdragons and the Butterfly bush that I probably already killed through over-pruning and the Blue Danube Hydrangea that has struggled between outbreaks of leaf mildew for months. I won't be surprised if everything in the new greenhouse is dead. I love the idea of gardening, but my thumb has never proven to be as green as I'd like it to be. I've sown the Echinacea in a tray inside, but I'm not confident in its longevity either. The peace lily is actually blooming again though after several dormant months so something is happy. Do I need to be a good gardener? I bothered my mom with endless chatter about the greenhouse and she kindly said I'm just like my great-grandmother (Grammie)  and my grandma who both liked to garden. Mom said she was sure I'd spend many happy hours in my greenhouse, so now every time I see it I feel like it has this invisible sign over it that says "Many Happy Hours." It's a weird thought, but a good one. Like a name or a title. If the garden and all its related activities are just for me, I suppose I can be a terrible gardener and still enjoy many happy hours. I don't need to be good.

My BF is coming to visit for a day or so, and I asked if he wanted to help me put in a small fence to give the dog a sort of run in the back around the greenhouse, just so she doesn't have to be leashed all the time when I'm out there. He kindly said he'd help, but I know it's not his thing. The truth is I don't think I'm his thing anymore either. Distance does that. People go away, they change, they connect with new things and new people, and even if no one does anything wrong people don't come back the same people they were. You can't fault a person for responding to the stimuli around them. You can't fault them for chasing their dreams. Can you fault them for not seeing you as a dream worth chasing? Accosting people doesn't change the circumstances, and people have to want to do what they decide to do or no one ends up happy. There's no use in being angry that plans change, or that people change. I can't make myself perfect for him. Being good to him is maybe the best I can hope for. I'm not at all sure that even that is enough; and if it isn't it will have to be okay to me.

There was a desperate time when I tried so hard to be all things to all people and all of the time, that I completely burned myself out. I can look back now with the clarity of hindsight and see that it really was a desperate coping mechanism, and a kind of self-flagellation for perceived failures. We lost a student. I lost a student. He committed suicide, and I wasn't sure that I could have done anything to stop it, but I also didn't know that I couldn't have. What I did feel sure of was that I couldn't lose another one. So I did everything in my power to take care of absolutely everything, and it is so very simple, so obvious to point out that the person left out of the mix there was me. I didn't take care of me; but at the time it didn't seem important. I didn't think I was important. I didn't think I got to be important because I lost one. It's an oversimplification to say, but not altogether wrong, that I didn't feel that I deserved to matter because what I deserved was to be punished, and that at the very least I could devote myself to saving all of the others. And if I didn't? Then at least I'd know next time that I couldn't have done anything else to save them.

And, you know what? I didn't save the next one. And I felt relieved, because this time I knew it wasn't my fault. I tried so hard. It cost me almost everything that was important to me. I didn't want to fail, but I was so tired, so bone-weary and so heartsick that I wanted to die myself. We lost her anyhow, so I didn't have to be perfect anymore, and for the next year I wasn't even sure if it was worth it to be good.

My students use this term "adulting" to describe a kind of nascent or imagined self-sufficiency. I pick up a lot of their slang so I use it too sometimes. It requires a metric of successful or even perfect autonomy, where people are confident and manage their time and resources without fail, and make healthy choices, and meet all of the appropriate benchmarks of American post-adolescence like acquiring assets and getting married and having kids. There's a great deal of talk on social media both about "successfully adulting" and about all of the ways in which young people feel they are failing to do so. They make a list and check it off and call it adulting, or they buy a new car and announce that they adulted today. Perhaps it's right to celebrate the simple victories. To say that it doesn't have to be perfect, it's enough that it is sometimes just good. That good is good enough. I wonder if that is something I can learn to believe in without it feeling like another kind of heartbreak.