Enough Not Enough

Inspired by "Whose Shame Are You Carrying" by Tash Doherty

Not enough.

I watch a friend get engaged, scroll past a pregnancy announcement, and I feel not enough. A friend buys a house, another has her second kid, squeezes me in for coffee before a married couples dinner, and there it is again: an ever increasing hum that I have fallen short because I don’t exactly “fit.”

I’ve spent way too much money on every form of “healing modality” you can imagine: retreats, trainings, reiki masters, therapists, somatic healers, chakra balancers, psychics, and a few outright scam artists. I sat in discomfort on purpose, repeatedly, because somehow I thought this would be over if I felt through it enough… the void.

It’s Shabbat, aka Friday night. I’m alone, nursing a migraine, pounding ginger shots. I really shouldn’t be looking at screens, but I’ve got my blue light blockers on. I’m lying on my biomat, trying… yet again… to figure out what deeper wound still needs tending to.

How much more excavating do I have to do before this gnawing, grating, ever-persistent low-grade fuming feeling leaves?

BUT… and here’s what I unlocked on my most recent therapy walk… What if I’ve been obsessing over soothing something that was never mine to begin with? Conditioned beliefs that seeped and smeared their way into my mind, parasitizing it…so deeply embedded that I mistook them for my own thoughts, my own fears… so utterly enmeshed that it’s taken me 31 years to begin untangling them.

The insidious nonsense of “not enough” didn’t come from me or my life. It was inherited and consumed from everything around me: the messaging, the metrics, the reward systems that taught me, from a young age, that enoughness wasn’t inherent. It was something to be earned, worked for, paid for, and suffered for. I was taught to contort, squeeze, suppress, and warp myself to fit into the narrow, specific shape of what a conventionally “made it” life was supposed to look like. This belief, false belief, was planted within me so deeply to the point where I believed it was my own.

This isn’t mine, though. It was handed down through generations before me, woven into our culture, all around me… we all can be lured into these stories.

I realized this with my therapist last week, and it’s clear I’m still deep in the thick of processing it. I started laughing… no actually laughing… after going from full-on freaking out to this sudden, lightning-like clarity. I was cackling at how urgent the timeline around having children had started to feel. The deeper layer was I don’t even know if I want kids or if that urgency is something so ingrained and culturally programmed.

The cackles came from realizing just how much I had constructed, how much of a figment this so-called “urgency” really was. It’s the same story that says a woman’s worth has an expiration date; that at 31, I should be scared into fear tactics of freezing my eggs because my fertility, and therefore somehow me, is running out; that I need to fill in my natural lines with poison just to maintain something I’m supposedly losing as if existing in time is a form of eroding damage.

I know it’s not true and I have known for a while. But knowing it is different from releasing it, so I release it here.

Linearity isn’t me and I am learning to be OK with that. I am an alien of sorts (Aquarius moon). I can rest in the knowing that I am doing my work, not numbing, not bypassing, not performing healing.

So, enough with the stories of not enough. I am enough.

May we all find our way back to that.

This piece is deeply moved and inspired by Miss Educated By Tash Doherty’s Whose Shame Are You Carrying?