Good Enough for What?

By Audrey Yap

A lot of adults probably don’t cry when they’re told to eat more food and drink more water. But Sido Adamson recently ran a workshop at ICS on recovery, and when she told us that, a few of us (well, I anyway) almost did.

But let’s back up a little, because this isn’t just going to be about me. It’s also probably going to be about some of you as well. Here’s a list of things that a lot of us have probably thought about ourselves as aerialists or acrobats. Or more specifically, some of the things on the list are reasons why lots of people (lots of us) are reluctant to think of themselves as real aerialists or acrobats, or whatever it is you might be training for:

I’m not flexible enough.

I’m too old.

I’m not strong enough.

I’m not coordinated enough.

I’m too short.

I’m too tall.

I’m not graceful enough.

I’m too big.

I’m just not good enough.

Doubts like these are so common and arise so naturally from the background structures of our lives that we often don’t question where they come from and how they impact us.

We might feel like we’re not good enough - but good enough for what?

A lot of us live in spaces where we’re measured. Maybe the literal proportions of our bodies are evaluated against abstract standards that weren’t made to measure individuals, much less people of the global majority. Maybe the measurements are grades at school or metrics at work - there’s no shortage of measures in many of our lives, and messages we’re encouraged to draw from those measurements. But we don’t have to give those measurements moral weight. And we also don’t need to let them define who we are and who we can be.

As an occupational hazard (I teach philosophy for a living), I overthink things. But the upside is that I’ve read a lot of insightful people whose ideas help me think through issues that I face in my life. And one of the really helpful ideas that I’ve come across is that identity is relational. What that means is that who we are as people isn’t completely up to us. It’s also up to the people in our community.

For example, if I happen to think I’m really funny and charming, but everyone I meet finds me really off-putting and weird, then I’m not really the funny and charming person I think I am. Maybe I’m wrong about myself or maybe I’m in the wrong crowd, but it’s just strange to say that I’m really funny when nobody I meet ever laughs at my jokes.

What that means is that maybe being a circus artist (if that’s what you want to see yourself as) doesn’t have to be about being hired by a professional company, getting square splits, or hitting a consistent one-armed handstand. Maybe it doesn’t have to be about how much of anything you are (according to whatever your favourite standard might be), so much it’s a matter of being in a community of people who hold you in an identity that matters.

Honestly, I know deep down that there’s no number on the scale I could hit that would mean I was magically good enough to be a circus artist.

What a lot of us are good at is being hard on ourselves, and that means we can always find some other standard that we just don’t measure up to.

So maybe it’s time to let go of the idea that we have to be good enough in some way to be real circus artists. Maybe we’re real already because we’re with people who will treat us that way.