You Can't Not Be Enough

double negatives and all

I woke this morning at 5:15, unsettled by my unfinished latte from this week and curious if what I need is more structure or less - for the piece, and my process, and my life.

This is a familiar worry of mine - my existential bafflement at the wisdom of Goldilocks who somehow familiarized herself with the ‘just right’ that evades me in my boomerang tendency of over scheduled and languishing, over structured and chaotic, hypercritical and… f - it. The perk of an overflowing calendar is the lack of lull, and for me, the comfort of moving from one place to the next. I prefer the caffeinated morning, am lured by the day when I’ve already walked the dog and written 10,000 words before 9am, and don’t recover from the stain of a ‘wasted’ morning if I wake up late.

It’s been a practice for me to make peace with days of all shapes, including those that feel wasted. The structure and focus of school and work are phenomenal until I feel behind. The idea of being ahead is such a driving force for me that when I receive my syllabus for organic chemistry, I re-wrote the weekly starts every six days rather than every seven, which got me a week and a half ahead at one point. But now that I’m somehow a half-week behind, my precious enthusiasm and opinion of myself are lost and instead of possibility I feel dread and the dark Dantesque whispers inviting me to abandon all hope.

This, I fear, is not a me thing.

It’s a me in the context of our weird cultural soup that has us convinced that ‘enough’ is a destination somewhere just beyond the horizon instead of a universal truth we can’t escape for even a moment. We are enough. We have never not been enough. Enough is a universal truth, and none of us is so special that we are excused from it.

Yesterday in a Yin training I heard myself teaching this again - so irritating to hear myself teaching something I need to learn. And this morning, after dumping another 3,000 unsorted latte-esque words onto the computer I’ve started again fresh - offering you a bit more of a mini-espresso rather than an unfiltered diatribe about pervasive classism and just how irritating all of us can be.

Instead, a simple truth.

You can’t not be enough.

I’m sorry it’s messy and contains a double negative, but it’s the truthiest truth I have. If I could send you a mug with which to enjoy your own morning beverage, this is what it would say.

Thanks for reading,

K