You Do Not Have To Be Good

 

    You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body 

love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. 

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese - harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things. 

((Wild Geese)) 

Mary Oliver

I’ll begin with a full disclosure because I feel like I need to get this out there: I’ve been working on this particular entry since June. It’s almost January of the. next. year. This entry has gone through several iterations, and it still doesn’t feel right. How do I say all of these things in a way that makes sense? That’s one of the reasons I started out with my girl Mary O. She gets it. She says it far better than I. Always. The poem “Wild Geese” resonates with me for some reason.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to be good.

Do you promise, Mary? 

****

I’ve spent my entire life trying to be good. “Good” in this sense is not used only to describe morality, but most every aspect of my life - behavior, effort, skill, etc. I figured out at quite an early age that to be good was to be loved, to be favored. School was my safe place. I knew how to be good there, and I craved the praise and the affection of my teachers that came along with being good. I followed the rules. I learned the material. I recited the poems. I colored inside the lines. I sat still. I never spoke out of turn. I was always a teacher’s pet. 

I remember vividly the first time I got in trouble at school. My kindergarten teacher was out that morning, and one of my classmate’s mothers was our substitute. I don’t remember anything else about the day before getting in trouble. It was naptime, and the boy next to me put a button in my mouth as I lay on my mat half asleep. I pulled the button out and got upset at him. The substitute made us both move our names since we disrupted nap time. I know it must’ve been spring because it was warm outside, and I was wearing a dress. I hadn’t had to move my name since school began in August. I immediately started crying. When my teacher returned later that day, I was still inconsolable. I remember going to recess and sitting on her lap the entire time while sobs wracked my tiny body. She tried to console me, but I wouldn’t, I couldn’t stop crying. I just remember that feeling - the feeling of shame. I wasn’t good. I’d tried so hard to please her all year, to do everything right, and now it was broken and would never be the same. 

I can count on one hand the amount of times I got in trouble for the rest of my years in school. I never wanted to feel that shame or embarrassment again, and I strove to avoid it. 

You do not have to be good.

No, I have to be good. 

There is no other option. 

****

The pattern continued unabated as I aged. I won’t lie and say that I breezed through college because that’s a patent lie. College became the first time in my life when I realized that I might not be good at all the things, I might not be a good person all the time. But I still wanted to be good; I was still deeply bothered when I was not good.

As part of my Art major, I had to take “life” classes - Life Drawing and Life Sculpture. Dear Reader, I am decidedly awful at making things look lifelike. I’m not that kind of artist in any capacity. 

Kimowan Metchewais taught Life Sculpture the semester I took it. I’d waited until senior year because gahhhhhd. I put off almost all the classes I didn’t want to take until senior year. But I liked Kimowan. He was incredibly, effortlessly cool, and he was such a talented artist. I wanted to be so good, and I was so, so immensely bad at life sculpture. 

One of our assignments was to find a large rock somewhere on campus, abscond with said rock, bring the rock in question to class, and then create an exact replica of borrowed rock that was double the size. It’s worth mentioning that we had to carve these pseudo-rocks out of a large cube of foam. No clay, no sculpey, nothing that one can actually manipulate easily to have the natural curves, bumps, and crevices of a rock. A cube of foam. 

My reproduction rock was hideous. It bore only a slight resemblance to the original, and I’d had quite enough of feeling like the dumb kid in class after about three days of foam carving and painting and legitimately trying to do well. 

I excused myself from class and decided to climb the three flights of stairs to the darkroom. I pulled my negatives and photo paper out of my locker and proceeded to blow off the last hour of Life Sculpture that day by working on prints for my Advanced Photography critique. I cared about photography. It was my declared concentration in my major. I was good at it. I was praised for it. I could do it well and without any particularly Herculean effort. 

Eventually, I remembered that my bag containing wallet/phone/entire life was still in the basement classroom beside my empty chair in Life Sculpture and would soon be locked in the classroom if I did not find a way to retrieve it. My best friend and roommate also happened to be working (non-nefariously, unlike myself) in the darkroom that afternoon. 

“Katie, you have to go get my bag from Kimowan’s class. Please, I’m begging you.”

“No! Go get your own bag!”

“PLEASE. Please. I’ll buy you Cosmic (sidebar: If you know, you know) later. Seriously, please. I can’t go down there.”

“He’ll yell at me!”

“No he won’t! He won’t yell at you! He doesn’t have any reason to be mad at you.”

She eventually relented (God love my sweet friend) and went downstairs in a huff to do my dirty work. She returned a few minutes later, bag in hand, knowing look on her face.

“Christy, He is PISSED. I mean…pissed. I told him Jeff (photography professor) asked you to do some stuff in the darkroom for him, and he said, and I quote, ‘That’s bullshit! She’s skipping, I know that she’s skipping, and you tell her that she’d better never skip my class again.’” 

I could never really make things right with Kimowan after that. I never apologized because I was too embarrassed. He was right to call me out. But I think he caught on to how frustrated I was by my lack of sculptural wherewithal. Eventually, he'd help me with things. If I couldn’t get the nose right, the lobe of the ear, the shape of the torso, he’d come over to wherever I was currently floundering in my mediocrity and grab my tools and show me how to make the curves softer, the lines sharper, the body smoother. 

I was not good. I was not good at all. But he still took the time to help me. He didn’t shame me or forsake me even though I certainly did not deserve to be in his good graces. 

Kimowan died in 2011. He had a brain tumor that kept recurring. He experienced much in the final years of his life, and I kept up with his work and his blog where he sometimes wrote about the struggle. I often thought about emailing him and thanking him for being good to me when I hadn’t been good, not good at sculpture, not good to him. 

I never did. I regret it. 

I wasn’t good to him, but he was good to me. I won’t let myself forget that I never thanked him.

You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

****

Does it sound like I’m stuck in the past? I assure you, I’m not, but perhaps I have an unhealthy fascination with it. I love graveyards and old houses and thrift stores. I love period productions, and I teach the works of (mostly) dead people to a captive and often unwilling audience for a living. 

But what are we in the present without the culmination of all our yesterdays in our today? 

In my previous post (entitled “The Sanctity of Things”), I wrote about how one of the heartaches of parenting is that one is always saying goodbye to different versions of one’s children as they age. 

But isn’t that also true of ourselves? To how many versions of myself have I bid adieu in thirty-seven years? 

Sometimes I think of a former me and shudder; other times I remember a version of myself longingly. But it’s not just the “me” for whom I long - it’s everyone else too. The friends. The co-workers. The classmates. The family. I find it to be a particular kind of magic: the fact that we all exist here, together. My life and yours have most likely intersected if you find yourself reading this random blog entry. And please know that if I’ve ever loved you as anything - a friend, or something more - I love you still. No matter how many years have passed. No matter what version of me you knew, I remember you and how you existed in the same sphere as I, how you enriched my reality in some way, large or small - isn’t it the same thing? This is magic - that you and I have existed in the same sphere together. 

Meanwhile the world goes on

Where is this going? Is she having an existential crisis? 

Well, maybe, but that’s nothing new. Every new version of myself has come complete with some sort of existential crisis, if I’m being honest. 

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees,

But the one thing that has remained constant in each of my iterations up to this point is that burning, godforsaken desire to be good. 

The albatross around my neck. 

How many years have I wrestled with it? To try to be good at everything, to be good all the time, to look good, to talk good, to think good, to do as much good as I can. But where has it gotten me? 

I read an article this year that declared (rather depressingly) that thirty-seven is statistically midlife. 

Okay, so maybe this isn’t an existential crisis but rather a midlife one - fair. 

You see, 2022 is the year that everything burned to the ground, but I was the one with the matches in my hand. What better way to start off a mid-life crisis than to light (almost) every bridge on fire and run across them with reckless abandon before they collapse into piles of charred wood and ash? 

Job. House. Friendships/Relationships. Marriage. I walked away from it all. 

“Why?” one might ask. 

The honest answer is because I was tired of being good. I was so very tired. I was tired of being grossly underpaid and acutely overworked under the guise of “ministry.” I was tired of doing everything I was supposed to do and feeling worse than if I’d never tried. I was tired of saying the same things ad infinitum. I was tired of praying years’ worth of prayers, over and over again, with no discernible answers. 

I was tired of being good and getting nowhere, getting nothing. I’ll say no more than that about my reasons. 

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. 

****

So here I sit in the ashes, but I am no mythical creature. I’ll not tell you an inspirational tale of how I arose from the smoldering ruins, reborn in a dazzling display of resilience and cliche. 

When I went to “new” teacher orientation over the summer, one of the last tasks of the day was to sit and smile for ID badge photos. I dutifully waited in line and gave my name when I eventually made it to the chair positioned precisely in front of a blue backdrop. My credentials were typed into the computer. 

“Oh, well here you are! You must’ve worked in this county before! We still have your previous photo in the system. Do you just want to use your old photo?” 

Admittedly, I’d done my hair and makeup that day expecting to have an ID photo taken, but I found myself saying, “Let me see the old one.” 

The screen was turned toward me, and there she was. There was the version of me who had worked so hard, so earnestly to start a career in education. There was the version of me who was unmarried, who had never had a child. I remembered her well. I remembered her fondly: she was a little too social for her own good; she dressed, Loooord, did this girl dress; she looked to the future with confidence and expectation; she feared nothing; she laughed readily; she wanted so very much to be good. I’d nearly forgotten her after twelve, almost thirteen years. 

As I remembered all this, I smiled at the thinner, tanner, far less tired face on the screen. 

“Keep this one,” I said. 

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

****

I find myself alone at the end of the day now, and in the loneliness I find myself. I’ve often thought about those past versions of me - what would they think about where I’ve brought us? And what of those versions of myself that are yet to be? Will they look back at this period and shudder, or will they think of this time with warmth and compassion for the version of me who is navigating a new reality - a reality that is simultaneously freeing and oppressive, permeated with both grief and gladness? It’s a time of emptiness, but it’s an emptiness that is waiting to be filled with something new. 

When the silent surroundings seem heavy, I think of the incredible bleakness of a mid-winter day. I used to loathe winter. Each January, I groaned under the iron weight of the thought of the spate of cold, dark weeks that awaited. When I saw the first daffodils emerge at the beginning of March, I was practically giddy because it meant the torment of frost and snow and cold was beginning to abate. 

As I’ve aged (straight into mid-life, apparently), I’ve come to appreciate winter far more. Winter is quiet, but there is purpose in the silence. The heavy summer days filled with the weight of daylight and warmth and activity give way to the delicious, crisp, and beautiful days of autumn. Winter seems an inadequate conclusion to such beautiful, full seasons when compared to her predecessors. But winter is breath. Winter is sleep. Winter is respite. Winter stops Nature dead in her tracks and says, “Enough. It’s time to be still.” And so Winter enfolds our world with a thorny peace: Rest before you begin again because you have no choice.

The bleak mid-winter day has beauty of its own. Doubtless, it is no match when pitted against the stained-glass spring morning, the golden summer afternoon, or the enchanting fall evening, but there is beauty of another kind. The sculptural branches of naked trees against the stark, blue sky. (Have you ever noticed how those same branches mirror the veins and capillaries in your hands, the bronchi and bronchioles in your lungs, the nerves and arteries of the brain?) The way the thick frost glitters in the early morning light. The terrifying allure of the clear night sky. The exquisite exhilaration of the rush of cold that takes away one’s breath. I count it all as beauty. 

And so I sit here, in the ashy mid-winter of my life, and I think of the daffodil. I don’t long for it; I know it will come. I remain patient and watch for the beauty there is to be found in the now, in the current version, in this season. I have tried to be so damn good, but for now I will be still and rest in the knowledge that you do not always have to be good.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese - harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.