You Do Not Have To Be Good

Hello my loves,

Long time no see! A blog within three months is honestly a record for me. I am so glad to be back.

Today I would like to talk about the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. It has been my latest fixation and the basis of my constant reflection. It is featured in her collection of poetry titled “Dream World,” which was published in 1968. But I was captured by this poem about a month ago, and it’s been stirring within me.

I know that it is tradition to recap my academic school year with highs, lows, and lessons learned, as well as plans for the summer. This poem seemed to land in my lap at the right time. Particularly, the line “You do not have to be good.” What a captivating start to a poem, and what a poignant phrase to live by. The next two lines hound on this idea, remarking

“You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”

As an eldest daughter, it is a no-brainer that this line would capture me. I have spent the last year trying to capture and write about what it means to be an eldest daughter. I have written and erased. Written and felt guilty for expressing my feelings and erased. A cyclic motion of emotions that has arrested me and left me in a self-imposed writer’s block. Mary Oliver’s line shocked me out of this self-made paralysis as I reflect on the year; what a relief it has been to look at it without the need to be good. What grace it has granted me to freely look, reflect, and grow.

I just completed my junior year of college. What a surreal thing to say. I feel as though just a few months ago, I was writing about the end of my freshman year, the boy who broke my heart, and my friend group that imploded. Yet it has been so much longer, and time has passed ever so swiftly. In a year from now, I will be a college graduate. It seems so close yet so far. As I was reflecting on this year and the most important lesson I have learned. I couldn’t quite find the words that captured the depth of one of the most important lessons I have learned.

Enter Mary Oliver’s first line “You do not have to be good.” This year was filled with so many ups and downs. I felt like I was getting myself on track after a long stretch of self-sabotage, only for life to implode and for me to fall into old habits and vices. I lost a very close friend of three years and did not handle it very well. I wanted to finish a project, made promises to myself that I was determined to keep, and didn’t.

To be completely honest, college has been such a humbling and humiliating experience for me. Before college, I always felt successful and validated by my achievements. Even when I failed, I seemed to fail upwards, or in a very minor, non-life-altering way. In college, however, I seemed to make life-altering and derailing mistakes. I failed one test, then two, and then a class, missed opportunities, felt extra dumb, failed in friendships, failed as a sister, as a daughter, and as a Christian. I failed in every arena that used to be my source of validation. I got really tired of it, and then started to expect it. Before I knew it, my life was a live human model of the learned helplessness I learned about in class. All the things that made me consider myself “good.” All the things I used to get compliments for, such as "being a good student” and “an easy kid,” were slipping away from me. And I could not allow myself to feel angry, because anger was so unlike me. Anger was unbecoming and not in line with being an “easy kid.”

But as I look back on this year, I found my greatest lesson and source of freedom in being imperfect. I remember walking into our room and starting to recount something that had happened to me that day that upset me. I began repeating my routine phrases of “I’m fine. It’s fine. I’ll get over it.” But suddenly, the weight of Mary Shelley’s words “you do not have to be good” settled in my bones, and I said, “Actually, I’m not fine, and that was not okay. I am actually angry and upset about that.” The weight that lifted off my shoulders after saying that was hard to describe. It genuinely felt so liberating to share my feelings without the underlying expectation and tension of being good.

As I look back on this year, I could list out all the good and bad I did. But I think I would be missing the point. This year was a beautiful year, and my existence was enough, both in the moments that I was “good” and in the moments where I wasn’t. I grew in more ways than one, and the most fulfilling lessons and growth came from the moments where I wasn’t good. What a liberating feeling it has been to just live without the burden of proving myself by being “good.” With this, I will leave you with the full text of Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” because it is worth reading!

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 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 the 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.