Never Good Enough
On accepting who and what I am, and writing for discovery
Last night I got into bed and wrote in my journal.
My spine was hurting— somehow I overdid it without realizing it, which makes sense, a month after surgery. I’m impatient. I want to heal. Immediately. Now. I want things to be different. This is true for everything. Me wanting things to be different. Me wanting control.
Writing in my journal has always been a way of discovering what’s happening inside me. I don’t require my writing to be any certain way, like I do everywhere else. My sentences can be messy, my subjects mundane.
Last night I wrote about finances, about my lease in Tallahassee falling through because of mold, about my cat, about the world and how fucked up it feels.
Then, I wrote about resentment.
Resentment sometimes feels like a personality trait. I’ve done a lot of work over the years to parse through why I resent things, and nowadays I tend not to resent individuals, but rather the structure of the world around me.
On my worst days, my inner dialogue can sound alarmingly like Eeyore’s lamentations. Eeyore, the sad donkey from Winnie the Pooh, is most famous for the phrase, “Thanks for noticin’ me.” The nice thing about the portrayal of Eeyore is that Eeyore isn’t rejected for being such a downer.
Unfortunately that’s not the case in western culture, where we’re often told that sadness and other “negative” emotions are personal flaws rather than understandable reactions to our broken culture.
For a lot of my life I gaslit myself when I’d get into Eeyore mode. I grew up with a former Scientologist who eventually fell victim (in a real way) the The Law of Attraction, which was first mass fed to Americans in the film The Secret.
The Secret claimed that individuals can manifest wealth beyond their wildest dreams by thinking positively. If you’ve ever made a vision board…you’ve engaged with The Secret. The philosophy of the law of attraction blames people for their own sicknesses and traumas. It’s a modern manifestation (ha!) of prosperity gospel.
Prosperity gospel, also associated with Joel Osteen but regularly used in manipulative cults throughout the world, is decidedly capitalist and exploitative. I bought into it for a while, way back in my twenties. I wanted control over my life, and TLOA promised that.
When someone’s all in, the law of attraction can create a kind of fearful vigilance of one’s thoughts, especially of any “negative” thoughts that might bring real life negative consequences.
I’ve worked through most of my toxic ideas about thoughts creating reality. I’m grateful for that. But I am also vulnerable to my own negative bias, and my default is to feel like I’m fundamentally flawed. Maybe that’s why something like TLOA felt good in the first place.
Recently I noticed a thing that I do when I am feeling not good enough. My feelings of not good enough used to be feelings of being completely terrible. It’s improved. But I have days like yesterday, when I feel completely alone. I am alone. It’s not just a feeling.
I’ve been spending a lot of time alone for a very long time; since before the pandemic, even, when I was house-sitting in Europe. My longing for connection are in direct opposition to my social anxiety. I’ve been getting down on myself for not having many friends in Seattle, where I’ve lived since April 2020. I am not in close contact with my family here. I don’t speak to my stepfather, who lives in Olympia. My mom is gone. I have no siblings, and there’s whole swath of my family I don’t talk to. I’ve also ended several friendships because they just weren’t feeling right. Though there are some people in Seattle I still enjoy connecting with, they are all married, busy etc.
Usually, when I am feeling alone, I’ll do things that help connect me to others. I’ll go on dates or put feelers out for group events. Because of my back and my limitations, as well as my impending move, this feels like a waste of time. So I spend almost all of my time alone, only exchanging human interactions with people I pass on the street or see in coffee shops or grocery stores.
Taken on its own, this feeling of loneliness is not a value statement. But because I am human and my brain imbues everything with meaning, it morphs into evidence of my lack of goodness. I unconsciously create stories about why I am alone, how I deserve to be alone, and how I will always be alone. Those stories manifest in many ways: I dredge up old conflicts and parse through them, trying to figure out who is to blame. I sift through my family history, my diagnoses of CPTSD and ADHD, my financial status and appearance, and look for evidence of how I am not good enough. The things I haven’t accomplished, could have accomplished, or the different paths I could have chosen for my life.
I do this all without realizing it, until I am writing in my journal and it finally comes out on the page.
When I am gifted with this self-awareness, compassion helps me untangle all those narratives. I can never know if my interpretation of events is true or not, but no matter what, I can’t go back and change anything.
I have evidence of the positive impact of this compassion. The more easily I can forgive myself for my perceived transgressions or mistakes, the easier it is to forgive others, the easier it is to pick myself up and tell myself: I’m doing the best I can.
Something that often arises in these cycles is
how my writing is received or not received. It’s easy to twist up something’s value with how others engage with it. Like thinking someone has more important things to say because of their social media follower counts, or that the books that win awards are superior to the ones that don’t.
If people don’t comment on my writing, my newsletters; if they don’t retweet my tweets or like my Instagram posts, what does that mean? This is what my ego asks me, and then it tells me what it means. You know what it tells me, because yours may tell you the same thing.
I allow myself absorb the feelings that arise when I thought about the lack of engagement, feelings I avoid, because feeling them not only takes energy, but is often accompanied by a variety of value statements, as I’ve been discussing, that I must sort through and discard in order to metabolize things.
Whenever this happened, I think of a mentor who told me to find the joy in the work itself, rather than the reception.
To allow writing to be a mode of discovery, exploration, and play, rather than writing towards a personal interpretation of what will be well received.
To forget one’s audience, or, rather, pare my audience down to an individual who loves and accepts me as I am.
Last night, after coming home from a long walk, I kept my headphones on as I washed my dishes. I was listening to Mike Posner, whose music I only recently discovered (though of course I’d heard his most famous song in its remix). I was listening to him and thought: I want to do that. And then I thought: why didn’t I become a musician like I always wanted? And then I pictured the life I could have had as a musician, singing in band. I remembered what it felt like to be on stage, how much I loved it, and imagined that I had followed the thread of music instead of writing; if my life would be better now. If I’d be happier.
And then I thought, I have wasted my life because I am not the musician I was supposed to be.
And then I laughed at myself.
Because this is what my brain does.
There is part of me that tells myself, when I get (x) I will finally be successful, and these thoughts of inadequacy will go away.
And then I remember that I went back to college and graduated summa cum laude. That I got my MFA in creative writing at the very institution that I dreamed I’d get my MFA. That I wrote a book proposal and sold my book. That I am revising my book and that the book will be published next August. That I am heading into a PhD program on fellowship.
And then I remembered: I will never find total fulfillment in my accomplishments.
And then I listened to the hot water rushing out of my tap, and the clinking dishes. I felt the sponge in my hand and smelled my dish soap. I thought of my day, spent writing and walking. I thought of all the people who had donated to my GoFundMe— so many people who are willing to help me weather a storm I wasn’t expecting. I thought of everything I’ve been through and where I am, and how hard I’ve worked.
I listened to the hot water rushing out of my tap and remembered that fresh water is a privilege, and that having fresh, drinkable water straight from my tap is something many others long for. That hot water itself was something billions of people live without. That my refrigerator is stocked with food, my bed is comfortable. I remembered that I am alive. A privilege in itself.
It was actually when I first started singing in a band, when I was twenty-seven, that I learned about negative bias, from Tara Brach, one of my teachers (from afar). Negative bias is a survival mechanism. Our brains skew towards the worst case scenario in order to protect us. But in the technologically advanced and chaotic world that surrounds us, its tendency is to loop inward, wounding rather than protecting.
Not long after that, I learned about neural plasticity, which is the potential for the brain to grow and change. After having changed my life in so many profound ways (recovering from my eating disorder, getting sober), I don’t have to see the science in order to have faith in neural plasticity (though I have).
In my moments of vulnerability and solitude I’m capable of creating a lot of unnecessary pain for myself.
These moments are also the ripest, because they create opportunities for me to help my brain find new pathways— not by creating false narratives about how successful I will be or how the next thing I achieve will make me happy, but by bringing myself back to the present moment. The present moment is the only reality. The past is interpreted and distorted by the faulty mechanics of my memory. The future is unknown.
If I can accept myself fully in the present moment, I am creating a pathway towards accepting myself fully in many other moments, whether I am successful, whether I fail, or anything in between. Instead of depending on external value markers, I save myself from delusion in each moment. This doesn’t make life easier. This doesn’t change the reality of loneliness or fear or sadness. This creates a sense of allowing for everything, including joy, contentment, and equanimity.
I don’t need to manifest my health, or a new car, or a sweet house. Because those things aren’t permanent, nor will they assure my happiness.
I turn to the page and write this, without needing anything in return. I turn to the page and discover myself, and I like what I see.
Want to tell me what you’re struggling with, or how you’re feeling? Leave a comment.
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