An excerpt from Kelly Corrigan’s essay,

“’You’re Good Enough,’ My Dad Said. ‘Trust Me.”

“Finally, ten years later, after I’d set up a decent life as a functional forty-year-old, after I had become something closer to the person he always thought I would be, I asked Greenie why he had been so sure I’d sort it out. “You know, Lovey, you were never down for long. You’d get cut from field hockey and try out for cheerleading. And then that didn’t work and you did chorus or the diving team. You don’t need to get it right every time, you know what I mean? A couple wins here and there is plenty.”

That’s how it works: someone important believes in us, loudly and with conviction and against all substantiation, and over time, we begin to believe, too—not in our shot at perfection, mind you, but in the good enough version of us that they have reflected. The mentors and rabbis, the grannies on the bema, are certain about things we can’t yet believe: that listening is huge, that there’s might in the act of committing yourself to a cause, that trying again is both all we can do and our great enabling power. They see clearly that we weren’t wrong; our aim was. They know that we are good enough, as we are, with not much more than our hopeful, honorable intent to keep at it. They tell us, over and over, until we can hear it.”