Wrestling With Old Demons: Can We Ever Hope to be "Enough?"
It seems like we spend an awful lot of time in this life striving for more, sometimes to the point where it almost becomes an obsession.
I'm not suggesting that ambition and a desire to climb the mountains of our personal dreams is necessarily a bad thing... but sometimes it seems like good people get caught in rather toxic loops.
On a personal level, one of my bugaboos has always been the fear of not being enough.
It has manifested in a number of ways across the years, some of them subtle and some of them more direct.
I suppose we all have points of fear that we try to avoid. For example, I remember many years ago when I was dating, one of my greatest fears was always that the woman I was going out with would discover just how boring and ordinary I was. In essence, a version of "not being enough."
At different times in my life — generally before I became self-employed — my worry was often that I wasn't "enough" in the context of the job as I had. Not ambitious enough, not aggressive enough, not assertive enough, not competitive enough; enough of a leader...
Some might look at that and declare "oh, that's just humility!" But I'm not so sure about that... is it truly humility or is it actually a fear of sorts? More specifically, the fear of not being enough?
So who exactly is it we're trying to be "enough" for? And what is the feeling we're trying to avoid by fighting so hard against it? And are we just reacting to the perception that those we are in contact with have incredibly high expectations of us?
Perhaps the thing most of us are trying to avoid the most is the sense that we are being judged. Why judgment should feel so awful to any given person, I'm not sure... after all, we all judge whether we admit to it or not. Let's be real here, we judge the moment we walk out our front door!
So is this all ultimately about a lack of self-confidence? A lack of belief in ourselves?
The thing I noticed a number of years ago, is the fact that absent people who whose opinions I really valued and whose good graces were important to me, I didn't really worry too much about whether or not I was "enough." I definitely felt like I was enough for myself. So really, the worry about being enough had more to do with impressing other people than anything else!
Why exactly we choose to put ourselves in these painful predicaments I'm not sure. I think in my case, it had a lot to do with growing up with incredibly critical parents to whom most of the time it felt like I was not enough. And so, I grew up to be an adult who was still trying to be enough rather than simply being myself.
Most likely, we are enough. The challenge is simply to make peace with our own shortcomings — and goodness knows we may have some — and going forward with our lives without worrying so much about what the external world thinks we should be.
Easier said that done? Perhaps so... but very important!
Thanks for visiting, and have a great week ahead!
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Created at 2023-06-05 00:11 PST
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