you are good enough as you are

new year's resolutions ✦ self-compassion versus self-aggression ✦ Jan-Jan van Essche and gentle, genderless fashion

It’s January 1: everyone is choosing, announcing, and committing to new year’s resolutions.

E.M. Forster’s new year’s resolutions for 1905, via tumblr. Question for the culture: would Forster have been into elf bars?

But what I’m thinking about today is what new year’s resolutions represent: the desire to change ourselves, to become new and better versions of ourself. More kind, generous, decisive, strategic, well-read, introspective, agentic. The underlying assumption behind many new year’s resolutions is that we we are not good enough as we are, and we need to be better. Now, this year. It’s important, maybe even urgent!

We are good enough as we are

As a counterbalance to that, I’m thinking of an interview I read with with Jan-Jan van Essche, a Belgian fashion designer who makes genderless, loose garments, all in natural fibers that drape around the wearer. What I love about his clothes is that they reflect the autonomy of the body, its essential wholeness and desire for unconstrained motion.

In 2017, he was interviewed by Friends of Friends about his approach to design and fashion. Instead of the relentless seasonal calendar of typical designer fashion—where each new collection is expected to be novel! different! revolutionary!—von Essche noted:

My collections always have the same central theme. The same moodboard has been on my walls now for three years. There are some things I take away or add but in the end it is a very slow process that retains certain key elements. I don’t reinvent myself with every collection. I see it more as a continuous story.

And I do think we can see the self this way—as a continuous story, not a self that has to be relaunched and rebranded each year.

But the part I think of the most—I probably return to this interview every year or so—is when van Essche is asked what the nature of this story is, the identity of his brand:

There is something I come across a lot in folk culture and traditional garments: the fact that the body shapes the garment more than the other way around. A kimono is the same cut and size for men and for women. A boubou in Africa is merely the width of the fabric—how it looks depends on how you look…

We are good enough as we are. I’d say that’s what defines my clothes along with natural textiles, soft colors, monochromatic palettes and less and less seams.

We are good enough as we are. How often does anyone tell us this? How often do we tell ourselves this, especially when we’re caught up in the frenzy and fervor of a new year, a fresh moment in which to become the kind of person we always wanted to be?

There’s something suspicious, maybe even scary about believing this. It seems to suggest complacency and statis. But I believe—quite strongly—that believing we are good enough as we are is the essential precondition to any kind of change we want to make.

It’s also rare and special to hear this from a fashion designer. Because while fashion can be an expressive medium, one that cultivates a positive relationship with the self, one’s gender, one’s cultural or subcultural identity, and so on—it is also, very frequently, something that can be used for self-flagellation and self-aggression. Fashion can make people feel unworthy because of their weight; because they don’t conform to the right way to be a man or a woman; because of what they can and can’t afford, and how that makes them included or excluded in particular spaces.

This self-aggression is part of fashion, part of our lives, and it seems to take an enormous amount of energy and interrogation and reflection to notice it. And once we notice it, we have to decide: do we always want to feel this badly about ourselves? Or is there a way to feel better?

On self-aggression

I love the term “self-aggression” because, once named, it seems to fix into focus all these ways in which I—and maybe you?—feel a sense of loathing, resentment, and perhaps even hatred towards myself. And all the ways I enact cruelty against myself.

I was introduced to the term by Bruce Tift’s Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, where Tift describes an approach that synthesizes Western-style psychotherapeutic practices with Buddhist approaches. There’s a natural tension between these approaches; psychotherapy, for example, might encourage a Freudian-style analysis of your familial dynamics and how they affect your relationships now, whereas a Buddhist approach might encourage fixating less on the past and forgiving one’s parents instead of attributing certain dynamics to them.¹

Tift believes that both approaches offer something to us, psychologically; there’s no need to choose one, but rather shift fluidly between them, depending on our needs. His book is full of gentle, nurturing, firm guidance on how to live a life with less mental suffering and a bit more mental serenity.

And—relevant to our discussion on new year’s resolutions—he observes that “most of us…have an investment in making ourselves the problem”, in analyzing our lives as if there is something fundamentally wrong with us, something that needs to be fixed. We pathologize ourselves and believe that’s the best way we can heal.

[W]e have a very strong tendency to believe that we ourselves, and our lives, are problematic. Claiming that we are problematic means we don’t have to engage with our lives fully, because we aren’t “ready yet”—there’s something wrong that needs to be fixed first. Before we can be truly intimate, we must heal old relationship wounds. Before we can go for our dreams, we need to resolve our self-doubts. Before we can be fully embodied, we need to lose this extra weight. Once these issues get fixed, then we will actually show up and be fully engaged. But right now, we have a good excuse to not show up. And it turns out that really showing up—being fully present, embodied, openhearted—is often a very intense experience. Having a complaint also gives us an explanation for our difficult experience—and if there’s a cause, there should be a solution. “I should be able to have the life without disturbance that I deserve once this unfair problem is cleaned up.” It allows us to continue our disengagement indefinitely, since there will always be some unfair problem in our lives.

This belief that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us, Tift suggests, is what holds us back from living well. And being self-aggressive is not a useful way to motivate change; it’s actually something that continually wounds us.

[S]elf-aggression is not just a relic from the past; it’s something we choose to reinvest in, over and over, every moment. We actually maintain a practice, with great effort, of being aggressive toward who we find ourselves to be. If we can become curious about the function this serves, if we invite greater awareness, then we might find that we can work with our issues much more skillfully and kindly.

What if we stopped practicing self-aggression? What if we chose to respect and value and even love who we are? Sasha Chapin has a beautiful description of what this might feel like, in his Substack post “How I Attained Persistent Self-Love”:

[Persistent self-love]…is not the feeling that I am awesome all the time. Instead, it is the total banishment of self-loathing. It is the deactivation of the part of my mind that used to attack itself…It’s the sense that, while I might fuck up, my basic worth is beyond question—I have no essential damage, I am not polluted, I am fine.

On shame and failure

If we believe that we are good enough as we are, then—paradoxically—we are actually able to change ourselves, change the aspects of our psyches and our lives that cause us pain. Self-aggression is a vicious, exhausting way of berating yourself towards change. It just hasn’t worked for me: keeping an exhaustive inventory of all the times I’ve fucked up in my life, cultivating immense amounts of shame in the face of all my inadequacies.

In 2022 I read Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost, a memoir of her passionate love affair with a Soviet diplomat in the months before the Berlin wall fell. I continually return to this passage, where Ernaux comments on the uselessness of shame:

For five years, I’ve ceased to experience with shame what can be experienced with pleasure and triumph (sexuality, jealousy, class differences). Shame spreads over everything, prevents any further progress.

Shame does prevent forward progress; it keeps us imprisoned in the past, in a state where we continually reinforce what is inadequate about ourselves. I love this Ernaux quote because it suggests that we not just leave shame behind; we actively counterbalance it with a sense of joy and pride and pleasure.

No more self-flagellation, no more self-laceration! Instead of all that: curiosity about who we are, a fundamental acceptance of ourselves, and a desire to continually move forward, live openly, and change ourselves in gentle ways.

On failure

The absence of shame makes trying—to do something new, change how you usually act in a difficult moment, cultivate a practice or ongoing habit that has so far eluded you—less terrifying.

Because shame often comes from fearing failure or actually failing, and then feeling as if the failure has something important to say. It says that one’s fundamental worth is now in question. It says that one’s aspirations are foolish, pretentious, and too far out of reach. Those aspirations now have to be given up, while you crawl away into a corner, mired in fear and inadequacy, and never try again.

I mean, that sounds so ridiculous! Histrionic, even! But I know I’ve felt that way before. I would very carefully, tentatively reach for something, and at the slightest sign of disapproval or difficulty scuttle away again, collapsing into my shame and self-loathing, and I wouldn’t have the energy to try again for months.

When it comes to writing, this is a particularly frustrating form of self-sabotage. In late 2020 I decided I wanted to “take my writing seriously”, whatever that meant. I began pitching essays and criticism to different publications, and of course I’d get rejected! It’s part of the process of pitching, part of the process of writing (poets and fiction writers experience this too). The first pitch I sent was accepted—a huge relief for me, because I was so fragile about failure at the time, so sensitized to rejection. But when subsequent pitches were rejected, it was very, very painful. Painful because I had an unexamined belief that a rejection wasn’t just This idea isn’t right for us now, but rather: You are an inadequate writer, your attempts to write are embarrassing and trivial, and you should really curl up and die instead of bothering us with your ambitions.

But I want to write, and I want to take my writing seriously, and that means learning to face rejection and not fear it. I’m interested, now, in what life can look like—and what a writing practice can look like—when I no longer fear failure. When failure is no longer devastating, but interesting. When I can learn from it. It’s easier to learn from failure when I can tolerate the pain of it; when it’s not threatening, and I can learn things like: Maybe this pitch was rejected because it’s not clear why it’s relevant to the publication? Why it’s relevant now? Maybe I can make my pitches shorter, punchier, better?

No shame needs to be attached to trying and failing. Maybe I can learn from Ernaux and experience these attempts with pleasure: It’s so amazing that I even tried, even put myself out there. And sometimes, of course, you try and don’t fail.

In 2020 I sent a pitch to the modernist, a British magazine devoted to modern and 20th century design and architecture. I was rejected, but very politely. I sent another pitch in 2022, which ended up becoming my first piece for a print magazine. I am profoundly, profoundly grateful that I actually tried again—I didn’t let the the horrible, unnecessary shame of rejection hold me back.

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I have many resolutions for 2024, but the guiding intention behind them all is this:

There is nothing to feel ashamed of. There is nothing fundamentally broken about me, nothing that needs to be fixed before I am deserving. Any goals I have are in service of feeling more agency, autonomy, joy, and pleasure in life—not to escape the feeling that I am fundamentally unworthy, not to paper over a deep and inescapable self-loathing. Shame does not serve me. Only self-acceptance will help me move forward.

And I’m wishing you all a beautiful 2024, filled with self-acceptance instead of self-aggression, self-loathing, and self-flagellation.

One last thing: I’m beginning the year in Mexico City—will post in the coming days about some of the art and architecture I’ve seen here! But for now:

Two moments from Mexico City: the architecture and the lettering here are both so, so exciting! It's beautiful simply to walk around and observe the world

1. This is an oversimplification of psychotherapy versus Buddhism—please forgive me!