Let me be perfectly clear.
What I'm about to say can be boiled down to one very, very simple message: you aren't good enough. You've never been good enough and you're never going to be good enough. You will never be strong enough or smart enough. You will never be thin enough. You will never be sociable enough or achieve enough. You will never be liked enough or be organized enough.
Whatever you do, and there are so, so many things that you will NEVER do, but whatever half-assed efforts you actually get around to making, they will never be up to standard.
No one will ever be proud of you because there is nothing about you to be proud of. You will never do anything to be proud of.
You weren't good enough at gymnastics. You weren't good enough at piano. You weren't good enough at theater. You weren't good enough in high school. You certainly weren't good enough after high school. You weren't good enough to stop either of your marriages from failing. You're not good enough at your job to do it without messing it up.
You aren't a bad person, don't get me wrong. You're just a sub-par, ordinary, mediocre loser. You're inoffensive enough, not good enough to be famous and not bad enough to be infamous. It's sweet to watch you try, though. Your squeaky little efforts to practice and study and work out and be organized and get your ducks in a row are just charming. I look at you pretending like you're going to get somewhere, and I want to tell you not to bother, but it's just too much fun. Silly rabbit.
You only get what you deserve, and you don't deserve anything good. You deserve bland, ordinary nothingness, peppered with occasional spatters of pain and misery. Why are you surprised and upset when things don't turn out the way you want them to? You don't deserve to get what you want. Only people who work hard and get it right get what they want.
You don't work hard. Everyone thinks you do, but they're wrong. You don't practice enough or study enough. You don't have your promo together. You don't do any of the things you supposedly wish you could do because you can't get your shit together to take a class or make a phone call. It's all so easy, but somehow it's too hard for you.You could make it easy on yourself. You could fix up your promo and then get enough gigs to just perform and not teach. You could have gotten scholarships and not had to worry about school fees. You could have set up a study schedule. You could have been organized and got your shit together, but you didn't. And then you have the audacity to complain because things are difficult?
Is it dark, hiding there in the shadow of Your Potential? That great, big Potential that you supposedly have? You could performed all over the world, but you haven't. You could get a wonderful, high-paying job in the straight world if you wanted to, if you could finish up a degree in Something Sensible. You could change lives through the social arm of your current job, if you just committed yourself. You could work with big name companies if you'd just get your promo together and audition. You could get a street show together and do all the festivals and have a life that was one big party. But there's always an excuse, always a reason why you don't, can't, couldn't, didn't. And so your Potential looms, and you crouch there in the dark, getting paler and weaker and more insignificant every year.
So go ahead and pretend like you're going to change and things will be different, you'll get better, you'll be happier. You'll take your meds and go to meetings and show up on time to class and get straight A's and practice two hours a day and lose ten pounds and call your parents every week and see the dermatologist and get that scholarship and date guys who think you're just wonderful...and you still won't be good enough. Because even if you fulfil my list of demands, you're still falling short. Because you should have done it better, and you should have done it five years ago. You should never have let this happen in the first place.
Stick as many cheery post-its on your mirror as you want, repeat positive affirmations until you're blue in the face, tell yourself you're nice and pretty and everyone likes you...knock yourself out. I'll still be sitting back here, laughing at your feeble efforts. You and me, we're always going to be together. You can't get a divorce or move to another country to get away from me. I'll always be with you, little Iphy. You can count on me to keep you in line and stop you from getting ideas above your station. You'll never be good enough, and as long as you're not, I'll be right here to remind you of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment