Stop telling me I am good enough
I dream of a boss who'll fire me
I’ve had it with polite society.
I am blessed, blessed, I am telling you, to be surrounded, befriended, advised, and reassured by kind people who are better than me. Let’s not get lost in semantics; we all know what I mean by better. The sanctity of human life can survive just fine if we stop pretending that some people aren’t inherently more brilliant, hard-working, talented, eloquent, creative, mentally more robust, etc.
But it grinds my gears when my betters tell me I am doing *so* *well*. You know, when a child makes a drawing, and it is a straw man drawn with crayons, so objectively a shit drawing, but it is a child, so you do the reasonable thing and congratulate them because that’s good parenting; to encourage an attempt rather than disparage it.
This is fine when talking to a child. Still, suppose you extend this treatment to adults. In that case, you have a problem, especially if you are in a position where you hold power or advantage over them either because of your experience, position or talent. E.g. you are their mentor, manager, or more accomplished friend. Your job there is to improve that person, and you know what’s the sickest thing? You have what they need to do that. You probably know precisely what they need to do (usually work harder and smarter). You have sufficient distance from their situation and are already doing what they want to be doing. Then what the fuck is stopping you from laying down their path for self-improvement? You think it’s because you care and don’t want to hurt them, but you are only taking care not to harm yourself. People shoot the messenger, and you don’t like to be the one who breaks the bad news, which is thus: I am not good enough. I wish someone had told me earlier. I wish I had at least one boss fire me, but they never fucking do. Not in my industry, not in my demographic either.
These good Samaritans no one asked for are everywhere. A friend who was a straight-A student who went to Oxford and now has an 80-hour work week legal career tells you to give yourself a break. You are working too hard (for who’s standards, motherfucker? for the serf’s, or the Lord’s?). A best-selling author tells you your typo-ridden blog posts are so well written. Your boss takes time out of her packed-to-the-brim schedule to edit your mediocre work and then gives you an A** review; no bad vibes, Stacy; everyone roars with laughter at your stories at the water cooler. The skinny friend who is always dressed and pampered to the nines telling their depressed slob of a friend how wonderfully that strappy Zara dress they thrifted off Vinted looks tied around them like a ham hock. They are mopping the oil off their pizza slice with a napkin, but you enjoy that extra cookie honey; life is for living !!1!!
I’ve lost count of the native speakers who’ve told me, ‘I write so well for a foreigner!!1!1’, including my manager in my first speech writing job in Parliament (dagger in my heart). Who the fuck told you I am comparing myself to foreigners. I want to write well for everyone, and especially you fucking Natives. The British, the Americans, the cultural royalty of the world. I want to dominate your fucking literary cycles. I want to see English millennial lady authors crying outside Foyles because the window display has been cleared off their saccharine auto-fiction to make space for my disgusting debut novel about the assent of an immigrant who crossed oceans to share the gigantic chip on her shoulders with the starving masses of losers and incels who have been gaslit about being good enough for too long. I want my friendly professional acquaintances to stop being so fucking friendly, so fucking accommodating. I want them to pull the ladder behind them when they see me running behind them because I am viable competition. I want to finally, finally, finally get over the fucking moat.
Moat? What Moat? The moat of low status. Sasha Chapin describes it here. The moat of low status is the period of grace you are given when you first endeavour in a new field. During that time, you are new, so there is no expectation from yourself or others to perform well. You are rewarded and congratulated. People who have already been in the field have a lot of goodwill towards you and are keen to give you advice, share access to their network, etc., because you are not a threat to them but also because most people like helping people. If you have a high threshold for embarrassment (like I do, for example), you don’t need to feel bad when performing poorly because you haven’t yet had time to practice. According to Sasha, it’s good for your self-development to be comfortable in the moat of low status. That will allow you to try more things you wouldn’t dare start if you felt the need to always be excellent at anything you try your hand at.
I agree with Sasha, and I guess I can’t hold it against myself that my entire life, I have been extremely comfortable trying my hand at things, even, or perhaps, especially if they involved a public performance aspect—theatre, dancing, public speaking, stand-up comedy and now writing online and commenting on TV. My first Muay Thai (Thai kickboxing) fight I did last year would probably go in there too. These are all things I don’t have exceptional talent for. I am not saying I have zero talent; I am just not the kind of person Ivy Leagues would be lining up to poach from high schools or Big Four consultancies from campus career fairs.
I acknowledge that my ambition (and imagination) has always galloped miles ahead of my skill and capacity. I believe I am not alone in this very human experience. One of my favourite movies is Amadeus. The story of Mozart’s friend, Salieri, who lived in the shadow of his genius despite being more hard-working and wanting to write heaven-worthy music just as much, or even more so, than Mozart himself.
So I am grateful to myself for not losing my nerve when I am not dealt the hand I hoped for, for allowing myself to play weakly and for not holding it against me when I leave a game defeated. Many people live a life of stasis because they prefer the comfort of repeatedly doing the things they’ve always done. They watch movies and read books for novelty and adventure or, in modern times, scroll on Instagram and TikTok.
My galloping imagination means I can think beyond what is to what could be. This can lead to torturing myself with mirages of alter egos that will never exist, of selves who open their mouths, and God’s voice booms through, but it also means I can re-invent myself throughout my life. This is why I find it so fucking infuriating when I come across people who have been going at the grind harder and faster than me, who found out early enough that the only way is through, that doing anything impactful in this life takes dedication and laser focus, that there are no shortcuts, hard work first, luck second. Why should my mediocre performance be good enough for me when it wouldn’t be good enough for them?
I have been doing two things in the last six months that have been tapping into my insecurities: writing online and talking on TV (political commentating). In both, I have been on the receiving end of relentlessly well-intended praise from my superiors. People who speak and write better than me, who do it professionally and who have been doing it for longer than me, or who, you know what, I’ll say it, people who have been blessed with more talent than me. They’ll be on a panel on TV with me, and I will sound incoherent, emotional and foreign. They will sound professional, knowledgeable, and eloquent. Facts and analyses will flow out of them effortlessly. I will bumble my feelings, lose my train of thought, repeat the same line twice, abuse fillers, say billion instead of million, get my segment clipped and spread to the masses on Twitter because I am low-key embarrassing myself, and that plays well with the bloodthirsty crowds.
I once went on YouTube and watched another commentator who is often on the same shows I go on. In my YouTube clips, everyone commenting tears me apart personally; they make harsh but factual statements about my English proficiency and accent and the expected comments about my appearance and politics. On the other hand, the comments under the clips of this other guy discuss his political analysis and make zero mention of his delivery style, or indeed, him as a person. I could comfort myself by assuming that all these reactions to me are because these trolls are sexist and xenophobic (the other guy is white, English, posh-sounding etc.) and have nothing to do with the substance of my arguments, but I did not come to this life to die a fucking loser, so accept that two things can be true at the same time. The first is that my trolls are harsh and discriminatory. The second is that my performance is not up to scratch. I am not giving enough analysis or a coherent argument. I have been living in the English-speaking world for 11 years, and my accent has not softened one bit despite taking voice coaching lessons to soften its rough edges. I also dress in an attention-grabbing way, always have, and always will; I acknowledge that and have no intention to change because I have decided other people’s standards and tastes will not be mine. It is a harsh way to live when you are young and junior, but guess fucking what? Promotions keep coming, and the years keep passing, and one day, the standard will be what I say it is. Your overtone windows are no threat to a woman marching forward armed with a fucking hammer.
Still, it drives me insane when people who are doing better than me tell me I am doing well. Do they think I can’t tell the difference between my performance and theirs? Or perhaps what infuriates me is the implication that they may believe this is all I am capable of because this is all I have given evidence for. Meanwhile, inside my head resides a Stella who dominates every field she chooses to grace with her presence. I know this Stella is not real; I have dreams of grandeur, not illusions.
I don’t like watching videos online much, but whenever I see one of Slavoj Zizek or Camille Paglia, I always pause and listen. Not because I agree with everything they say but because how they say it warms my insides. I remember the first time I heard Zizek speaking live in a theater in London. I was 19 and, of course, knew of him and had read him before, like any self-respecting lefty London student, but had never heard his voice. I couldn’t stop giggling. He sounded extremely familiar. He sounded like me.
One of my biggest frustrations as a person with glaring long-held aspirations to influence others is that communicating in my non-native language has always meant people struggling to understand what I am saying or to recognise in me the gravitas I crave. I lap up videos of Zizek and Paglia because they have achieved the level of notoriety I want for myself, and they have done it sounding like me. Insane, foreign, angry, sometimes incoherent like stroke victims, loud and gesticulating like teenagers tripping on youth and adrenaline. I remember in university giving speeches in the Student Council and people whispering, ‘Is she drunk?’. My therapist always said, I don’t need ever to use coke; I fell into the coke cauldron as a baby.
So, I’d take a compliment from Zizek and Paglia if they were to offer me one (on the one hand: lol, on the other: life is long and full of surprises). But please, the rest of you high flyers, spare me the pity back pats. Grab me by the fucking shoulders and scream into my ears: YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH, you never were. You can’t do it; you’ve never done it and never will. Shake me till I am frothing at the mouth, and the soft, grumpy animal hibernating in my guts hears it and finally catches on, awakens from its slumber, arches its back, sharpens its claws, and growls. Watch me mothefuckas.
Achievement coddling and ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’ seem like cultural attributes of WEIRD countries, but they exist for good reason. Most people don’t want to hear (or can’t handle) personal critiques, especially in regard to something they are still learning.
But I’ve learned from experience if you ask people for their honest assessment of your work (and make clear what are the standards that you hold for yourself), you are likely to receive that honest feedback - and oftentimes people will not hold back. They just need reassurance that you’re genuine about improvement and won’t take it personally.
But since you brought up the desire for criticism……you should trim and streamline your writing style to a more cohesive narrative. The voice, ideas and convictions in these pieces are phenomenal, but I sometimes have to re-read them to understand your underlying message. This unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness style works better in stand-up, but I find that the best writing tells a focused, clear and linear narrative (with a large heaping of the author’s personal style).
Ichiro Suzuki said something similar. When he came here from Japan to play baseball mid career, he started succeeding very quickly. He set the single season hit record one year. When he got close to 3000 hits (for perspective, there are only 33 men in the history of Major League Baseball to cross 3000), someone said that if you counted his hits in Japan, he would beat Pete Rose (who leads all of MLB history with 4400, a number that will never be crossed).
Pete, who had earlier been supportive, said that Japan league simply couldn’t compare to MLB, as the pitching was grossly inferior.
Ichiro said in response that he had figured it out. When you aren’t a threat, he said, everyone praises you. When you are a threat to their legacy, they tear you down.
Anyway, hope this helps. It doesn’t get better even at the highest levels.