the delusions of being good enough

1.There are meaningful lines even in crappy dramas

I don't think i want to watch Ep 2 of this drama after Ep 1 but...

 

above translates as (i think):
I don't even like myself. What then does that make you who like me?
i think the line really appropriately describes the essence of my current fav topic -- one's lack of love for oneself.
(sorry about bad screen captures~ XD I still find Kyoko Fukada very pretty.)

2.From perfection to being good enough

there is a widely known psychological principle of "being good enough". ie. if you don't hold an unrealistic ideal of perfection but just aiming to be good enough then things usually turn out better and you will be spared of emotional distresses...(something along those lines...)
nowadays though i don't think many people would hold the delusion that they are "perfect" or even be aiming for perfection. in fact, many of us often feel rather comfortable acknowledging our known deficits with good grace and humour.
while we can honestly acknowledge we are really not great in many aspects of life--
there will always, always be certain other areas in which we feel we are good enough--adequate---more than adequate--better than the majority etc.
We take pride in these things, no matter how humble we appear on the surface, or how realistically we think we still fall short of "perfection" in those aspects of life.
and the more "good enough" we think we are, the harder we strive to be better at them, which makes it more the easier to avoid addressing areas where our true deficits lie.
in such situations, we often think we are "doing the right thing".

list a few examples:
- missionary pioneer sensed lifelong calling and did awesome work for the advancement of the word of God in woop woop land while grossly neglected his wife and children his entire life
- poet or artist devoted their energy to the noble sake of art, with their children struggling in perpetual disadvantaged environment of poverty and hunger and disarray
- family (or church ministry) oriented professional setting priorities right and getting complimented for that, while doing the bare minimum at work, unloading responsibilities and projecting anxieties onto colleagues and underlings.
- OCPD work oriented person who believe in "the man is nothing and his work is everything" working extra hard day in day out and gets complimented for that while neglecting the need to have a life (as they are not good at it)
- shrink who thinks the call is to master the skills of observation and analysis of the human condition from a certain safe (aka professional) distance while ignoring the importance of establishing genuine human relationships which is almost entirely a diff skill.

those of you who know me will prob find the last couple of dot points sounding rather familiar~ XD

3. Being good enough and being loved

i find the concept of being "good enough" rather dubious. Enough for what? for whom? after all it is much of an expectation from self or others as what perfection is, and just as much, an effort-based approach to life. many times i also suspect it is a euphemism for a higher expectation of some kind of all-rounded perfectionism...
(this article highly amuses me. talking about delusions of unrealistic ideals...)
and i will now get to the hard bit: even if say our impression/standard/belief of being good enough is literally just "being good enough"--
at some stages in our lives, we will invariably fail even that.
i think in many of our minds, we do feel we need to be "good enough" in some ways, in order to be worthy of love.
but there will be that moment in your life, you look at yourself in dismay, wondering why you have allowed whatever happened to have happened, despite you being so good at it, and loathe yourself.
yes, we are now not good enough. For ourselves, for others, or both.
and then we try hard to fix the problem, internalising or externalising it, and we do/think/believe in all sorts of horrible things in advertent/inadvertent conscious/subconscious ways, in order to justify that we are indeed... still... worthy of love.
and when we can't really pull it through, we get depressed/anxious/low self-esteem/comfort eating (you know the rest...)
classic example would be the Cluster Bs - who lie/act out/hurt others/being bad in their desperate attempts to project their badness onto others so that they themselves can keep their fragile beliefs that they are still good enough, and hence worthy of love from others.
the horror however goes on, amongst the rest of us, in much more subtle ways perhaps.

and I think the inevitable human aging process is the best reminder that not only there is no road to perfection by human effort, but even our good enoughs will one day inevitably fail.
we have all seen various degrees of adaptive/maladaptive coping in ourselves and others on the spectrum of difficulty accepting this.

despite often being sabotaged by religiosity, the essence of the Christian faith is indeed the breaking down of this automatic faulty link between being good enough to being good enough for love.
we not only fail at God's perfect standard of perfection. we also fail at our own imperfect standard of good enoughs.
and us being loved, consistently and unconditionally, has nothing to do with our good enoughs or our failures at those, and everything to do with Jesus, and the cross.
Love has nothing to do with worthiness, or good enoughs.
Which includes how nice and meek you are to people, how self-disciplined you are in private life, how enthusiastically you serve at church, how passionately you delivered a sermon/bible study, how much of a good witness you've been at your workplace, how profound your understanding of theological principles are...
and the same goes, even if you fail at any or all of the above areas--
Love is still there, not one bit less.
and quite frankly, I am still struggling to believe and accept that, not only with my head, daily.

it wouldn't be right to claim these ideas as my own. I hijacked from many, and only in the past week, these couple of Mockingbird articles really moved me forward and allowed me to process my thoughts to this point.
Ash Wednesday
Not ideas about love but the thing itself

4. Now going insightless and tangential...

on a much lighter note i went to this last night with Sally and really really enjoyed it. the satisfaction from the realisation that i can now spend my hard-earned money on such beautiful matters of life (instead of useless masters program fees/exam fees/exam prep course fees/re-sitting exam fees if failing) was so great i almost started to suspect whether it was inappropriate/over-indulgent/sinful...

and as i am currently trying to find a cell group to join i do wonder if there happens to be one around thats not too caucasian but literature/museum/gallery/concert/opera/ballet loving...(please let me know!) LOL yes i know, i actually want a hobby/activity group and am paying no attention to importances of godliness blah blah (and racist too -_-|||)... but, as i cannot think of a single time in my life when i did things/wanted things without a self-seeking motive component, i guess i will just be straightforward and frank about it.