Good Enough

I've been reading a very short essay called "Never Just Pictures" by Susan Bordo because my students have to read it and I'm always one step (only) ahead of them. It's a typical essay written in the 1990s about body image in fashion advertising . I've read it before, but isn't cool how different things resonate for us at different times in our lives. In her discussion of how it is that we find super-skinny, nearly-dead-looking people attractive, she says:

Freud tells us that in the psyche death represents not the destruction of the self but its return to a state prior to need, thus freedom from unfulfilled longing, from anxiety over not having one's needs met. Following Freud, I would argue that ghostly pallor and bodily disrepair, in "heroin chic" images, are about the allure, the safety, of being beyond needing, beyond caring, beyond desire. Should we be surprised at the appeal of being without desire in a culture that has invested our needs with anxiety, stress, and danger, that has made us craving and hungering machines, creatures of desire, and then repaid us with addictions, AIDS, shallow and unstable relationships, and cutthroat competition for jobs and mates? (Seeing and Writing 239)

And I am thinking about how Auburn's football team can "win" but not win at all because it wasn't a "good enough" win. Do you think we expect too much? Of our football teams? Of our bodies? Of our selves?

Will we wind ourselves in a knot so tight that it implodes? At this point, implosion and death feel like the only ways out. Is there another route out of our over-worked, over-stressed, over-competitive, under-nurtured lives?

When I start to think about "having my teeth fixed" or about "buying that diet pill" I think I may have lost touch. Yet, I do think those things -- and more often than I care to admit. I listened today to two BEAUTIFUL women discuss the shortcomings of their calves and having plastic surgery to "fix" their problems. I mean, they have bodies I would KILL for. But they aren't happy either.

I don't know. I just wonder if we might start preaching a philosophy of "good enough" and what the hell that might sound like. Maybe like (as a start):

so just let me try
and I will be good to you
just let me try
and I will be there for you
I'll show you why
you're so much more than good enough...

--Sarah McLachlan "Good Enough" from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, 1993