I made a list of things I wanted to let go of in 2016. At the top of the list was this: my deep-seated fear that I am not enough.
I had no idea when I wrote that how massive the reverberations would be in my psyche from the earthquake this would cause. We’re seven weeks in to this new year, and expressing a willingness to work on this hidden area of shame and being less-than has cratered my life.
The explosion is the worst. It blows all of your security and coping mechanisms apart. You are left with nothing safe or familiar. You feel naked, exposed, stupid, alienated. You think you cannot survive what just happened, but then something miraculous occurs: you do.
Getting at wounds that feel primal takes a herculean effort at courage. We want to scatter, like rats or cockroaches, as soon as the light touches the poorly-healed scar. Our deepest and darkest secrets reside in these places. The pain is staggering, fresh, overwhelming. The first instinct is to run; to put as much distance as possible between you and the hurt, to throw everyone else off the scent by summoning every trick in our arsenal to show that we are the opposite of our greatest fear.
But if we don’t run, something remarkable happens to us and in us. We stare it down. In my case, I saw that over the course of my life, I’ve developed healthier skills that helped me face the anguish I’d been running from.
Just because I felt less-than doesn’t mean I am less-than. I could prove, to myself, that I am more successful than I’ve been allowing myself to take credit for. While staring into this stinking abyss of not being good enough, I saw that I already had what I needed to be happy, fulfilled and optimistic. It was already there. Now the task was to claim it, to hold it in my hand, to cease striving for someone else to give it to me and simply be enough exactly as I am in this moment.
It all had to fall to shit before I could see it clearly. I had to risk losing everything and everyone to see how much I already had. This one has been a muddy, long slog. No one else was responsible for my own sense of worth. This was on me. I had to feel the sting of the shame and the fear in order to stare it down and come out safely on the other side. And damn, was it a solitary and terrifying journey, but the other side is as wide open as the prairies.
I’m free in this new landscape. I own my choices, my value, my soul, my fresh belief that I am enough and always have been. But worrying about what came before is a fool’s errand and I’m done being foolish. I can only move on from here and live out of this place of truth and beauty, where forgiveness finally exists for myself as much as for anyone else.
It will be less lonely now, for I can choose whom to invite into this new reality – the one where I am enough, simply because I breathe, and not because I’m terrified to show you just how hard I’m working to prove my worth to you. Those days are gone and it all looks so different now.
Our inside reality determines how we experience everything. I’m not setting my value now in a hypothetical sense. This is finally real, part of my daily experience, and I’m not handing this gift to anyone now. It’s mine, I own it, and I’m going to treat it much better from this point forward.
