Girl, Uninterrupted: You do not have to be good 

I didn’t believe in mantras until fairly recently.  

The concept made sense, of course: when your brain gets too chaotic, focus on a singular phrase and let everything else fall away. In my humble opinion, it’s all about finding the right words. My friends like to repeat Bible verses or film quotes or things their parents used to say to them when they were sad. Some people have prayers; I have poetry.  

In particular, I have the opening lines of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese:” “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.” 

Poems like Oliver’s leave room for a number of readings. My interpretation? Realizing you do not have to be good unlocks your fullest potential.  

So many of us equate external success with moral goodness and personal fulfillment. My theatre friends have told me that coming out of an audition in which they’ve done poorly feels like a moral failing. The label of “performer” is close to their heart; when they don’t perform up to their own standards, their self-perception shatters.  

If you’ve spent years believing you’re meant to make an impact on the world through the thing you’re best at, failure takes on an incomprehensible weight. Rather than a momentary setback to learn from, individual disappointments can open the door for deeper ruminations on who you are and what you’re meant for. Yes, it can be disappointing to fail at something that’s integral to your identity. The good news is that you aren’t tied to being good at anything. There is no preconceived quota for success in your life, and there’s no one waiting to strike you down if you stray from your five-year plan.  

It’s all too easy to get wrapped up in wanting to be perfect. But you don’t have to be perfect. You don’t even have to be good. 

College students experience incredibly high levels of burnout. Between classes, clubs, internships, jobs and social lives, we’re pulled in a million different directions. To make matters worse, achievements from GPAs to follower counts are constantly quantified and available for comparison. Holding perfection in such high regard makes it easy to forget that we’re all animals. Ending the semester with a 4.0 GPA won’t affect whether we live or die. Still, I’m sure we’ve all had moments of sacrificing food, sleep and our general mental wellbeing to get there. In no world should this be so common. Slow self-destruction in the name of productivity is inhumane.  

My solution to culling obsessive productivity? Training myself to be OK with failure. Think of everything you’ve held yourself back from doing because you’ve felt like you won’t be good enough. Trying things even if you think you’ll be horrible at them kills two birds with one stone — you’re simultaneously expanding your life and training your brain to accept imperfection. Let your body love what it loves.  

Lose at chess, sing off-key, take a poetry class, fall off a skateboard. The path to goodness starts from wherever you are in the moment. Oftentimes, you’re starting at a place that’s less than perfect. That’s perfectly alright.   

I recite “Wild Geese” before meetings, exams, auditions and phone calls. Any time I’m anxious, I return to a constant refrain of “you do not have to be good.” I’d encourage you to remember the same. If you’re looking for a mantra, feel free to borrow mine.