‘What if I’m not good enough?’

That’s my goblin.

It’s not just my goblin. It’s my husband’s goblin and my friends’ goblins and it haunts the dreams of so many people I know, online and in the real world, who dip their toes in creative works or dive in with both feet and a held breath. That goblin waits for the dark hours of the night and ambushes us from paragraphs of mangled reviews or worse, from the silence of a lone voice echoing lost in the static of the internet.

So let me be perfectly clear: you’re not good enough.

Don’t be mad. I’m not good enough either. No one is good enough.

We are, all of us, flawed and imperfect and self-destructive, and while we are constantly striving towards perfection, it a goal that none of us will ever reach. Take a deep breath and accept that you are not good enough. Be liberated by that, so that you give yourself permission to make mistakes. (Sometimes the accidents are so damn beautiful.) Pick yourself up, look at what you did.

Push yourself harder. The question was never ‘are you good enough’ anyway (because you know the answer, don’t you?)

No, the real question is: what are you going to do about it?

Let me tell you what you’re going to do: you’re going to STRIVE.

Strive for beauty and strive for truth and strive with the yearning of a maker born to touch the divine if just for a single glittering second. You’re going to surround yourself with the people who love you and will tell you your work is beautiful but more importantly you will seek out those souls who will tell you with brutal honesty that what you’ve just sweated out could be better, could be improved upon, who will set you on the road and slap your ass to get you moving.

Never stop moving. Don’t settle. Settling is its own reward, and it’s a dull and heavy prize.

No, you’ll never be good enough, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be fucking great.