You are enough
Hi, friends!
Every so often—I’m sure you can relate—our lives enter a season of setback. Maybe it starts with one thing; maybe it’s only one thing. Maybe it snowballs, and before you know it, a half-dozen things you considered to be relatively stable pillars of your life have started to sway. Maybe even crumble a bit. You find yourself at the center of several overlapping Venn diagrams that describe calamity. Rejection. Loss. Wasted opportunity.
I don’t know about you, but I find when I’m feeling this way, helpful perspectives find their way to me. Okay, maybe I also go searching for them a bit. Who wouldn’t?
Anyway, I stumbled on this old Reddit post:
You’re enough. Actually, fuck that you’re more than enough.
I don’t know you. I don’t know where you are, I’m not there at night when it gets dark and lonely, I’m not in the room when someone is talking to you and you nod and smile but inside you’re hurting and scared. I don’t know you, but I know you, I know the pain and the misery and the tiredness, of feeling unworthy.
I’ve got something to tell you. You are enough. You are fucking enough.
Don’t you just love it when another person, who probably is hurting in their own ways, just says the thing you need to hear?
I see you. It’s ok to feel sad, to acknowledge your feelings. It’s ok to be not ok.
But know this. No matter what, no matter what’s going on, what you think of yourself, you are enough. You are worthy, you are amazing and unique, by just being you. You are fucking worth it.
Cheers to that Reddit user. The comments are filled with people who needed to hear it right at that moment. So I’m sharing it here, too, because you might not even know if it’s the thing you need to hear.
Felicia and I are watching the current season of Ted Lasso. (I assume you’re watching, but if you’re not, I highly recommend the show. It’s doing a lot of important work around subjects like masculinity and vulnerability and such things.) Back in the first season, Coach Lasso poses a question to Jamie Tartt, the football club’s cocky star:
Lasso: Hey, Jamie, what would you rather be, a lion or a panda?
Jamie: Coach, I’m me. Why would I want to be anything else?
Lasso: I’m not sure you realize how psychologically healthy that actually is.
You are enough.
So much of not feeling enough—for me—is about false narratives. My brain works overtime, stapling together odd facts or hunches, collaging the mess together into a (usually demonstrably false, or at least highly unlikely) theory that, more often than not, is designed to make me feel less than enough.
But hey! I am enough, too.
It helps sometimes to remind myself that the I there is literally all I can control. I can’t make choices for other people. I can’t determine what they’ll say or do; I can only choose how to respond, if at all. (They, for the record, are also enough. They are not the villain of this piece. There are no villains, only humans who are, you guessed it, enough.)
We’re all on this planet a short while. It’s easy to forget that, and to let the setbacks feel a bit like the giant spherical boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But those boulders aren’t nearly as big as they seem. Remember the old Powers of Ten short film? Everything that looms large up close is comparatively quite small. All you have to do is teach yourself to see it from a bit of a distance. To remind yourself that boulders have a habit of rolling by. Or that they’re not all that maneuverable; you can just step aside sometimes. The important thing is to know that most discomfort will pass, and soon you will be a person who survived it, rather than a person in the midst of it.
At the end of March, I talked a bit about Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese. I think I’ve mentioned it a few times, honestly, but I keep coming back to it. It makes for a nice worry stone when I find myself spiraling on negative, often false thoughts.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again
I adore the simplicity of that observation. Whatever is troubling me, if I think about that line, I find immediate and soothing perspective.
But today let’s just recall the beginning of the poem once more.
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.
You are enough. You do not have to earn being enough. You are, right from the start, and right through until today. Tomorrow, too, you will be enough. You are always enough.
And so am I.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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