[Issue #38] What If We Were Enough?

A deeper look into the myriad marvelous and curious ways "enoughness" touches our human lives

“This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.”

-Glennon Doyle

I shouldn’t even be alive.

That’s not hyperbole or flamboyancy bounding outward from some blindside space; No.

Somehow, with every single self-destructive mechanism and any kind of ammunition I could find to inject into my shell of shame, I made it to here.

I made it to here.

If I would have told the story of my human experience even a year ago, it would not be nearly as full of joy, compassion, self-acceptance, and a sheer willingness to fail and keep trying anyway. That story would have brought you along for the ride, sure, like any good story should.

But good stories don’t abandon you, and that’s what the story of my life has been to me. A story of me abandoning myself, and thereby anyone close to me, in some capacity. And my story was one of everyone abandoning me, too.

Did I lose some significant, important relationships as I stumbled through, collapsed on top of, fell over, got stuck in and around as I tried to figure out who the fuck I am? Yes. Who hasn’t?

Were some of those relationships foundational to my being a full human being with a heart, a soul, dreams, memories, desires, passions, jokes, stories? Yes.

Photo by Михаил Секацкий on Unsplash

A lot of us have had people who were supposed to protect us, people who promised to keep us safe, then did the exact opposite - they betrayed us, harmed us, silenced us, scared us, shamed us, shoved us away so they wouldn’t be bothered with the black mirror of parenting. Or leading. Or guardianing. Or wing-maning. Or even friending.

Because to be a good, decent, fibrous, fleshy and vibrant being is to have connected emotional tissue and sinew with other good, decent, fibrous, fleshy and vibrant beings. We feed off of each other, and this paper, “Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century” which was published in Behavioral Sciences in 2013, makes a point of noting the incredible connection between us humans and that which we cannot see but yet know, sense, is present nonetheless:

“Carl Gustav Jung had the courage to propose that our mind is guided by a system of forms, the archetypes, which are powerful, even though they don’t carry any mass or energy, and which are real, even though they are invisible. The archetypes exist, as Jung described, in a “psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature”. Out of this system, the invisible forms can appear in our mind and guide “our imagination, perception, and thinking.”

We’ll be covering the hippy-dippy-woo-woo archetype stuff a little later on, but for now, the important takeaway is this- we are what we emanate and what we can’t see, we can feel. Not like emotions feel, but like energy feel.

Stick with me.

At the intensive PTSD program I did with Operation Mend at UCLA in 2018, we did purposeful movement that essentially had us tap into our inner energy, or Qi. At first, I was pretty skeptical of this, but as we moved through the exercise and softened our defenses, quieted our egos, the energy could be felt by everyone in the room. Energy is that powerful, and what the hell are we all made out of, anyway?

Einstein said it best,

“Energy cannot be created nor destroyed; It can only be changed from one form to another.”

So, as much as I wanted to argue (still do) and throw a tantrum about this energy stuff and self-acceptance stuff, I have come to realize that I need to lay my armor down. It’s not serving me the way it used to. It did, for a long time.

My armor, my defense systems, have protected me because that was all I had to protect me. But that was then, before I had skills, capabilities, resources, a frontal cortex to help me solve my problems. But now these defenses are keeping out the things I want in my life, and these defenses continue to pillage and strafe, even after ~30 years, my relationships and my breath in a lot of ways. It’s time to change that.

As I began researching this concept of “enoughness,” I found some interesting scientific pieces, one of which is this meta-analysis (updated in 2020) entitled, “LGBTQ+ Self-Acceptance and Its Relationship with Minority Stressors and Mental Health” (by Camp, et. al.,) that found correlating factors regarding low self-esteem, sexuality, and self-acceptance:

“Many individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and with other non-heterosexual orientations (LGBQ+) experience stressors within societal contexts which privilege heterosexuality as the normal and preferred sexual orientation (Meyer, 2003)…this chronic exposure to minority stressors is responsible for the observed increased risk of mental health difficulties in sexual minority populations compared to their heterosexual peers (Ross et al., 2018; Semlyen, King, Varney, & Hagger-Johnson, 2016).

Consistent with this suggestion, previous evidence suggests that increased levels of minority stressors in LGBQ+ populations are negatively associated with mental well-being (Burton, Marshal, Chisolm, Sucato, & Friedman, 2013; Gnan et al., 2019; Meyer, 2003; Pitoňák, 2017).”

I could tell you stories about my experiences with microaggression from others due to my sexuality. The weird looks in bathrooms. Terrible and hurtful jokes lobbed toward me as a teenager from (adult) family members. Being called all those horrible things in high school because of my sexuality, in the small town of Mt. Vernon, Indiana, which had more soybeans than people (and most of those people were white). Speaking of white, there were the strange looks, comments and glances when I was with my father’s family as I was the only white-skinned person in the group of us. And I felt like the only white person. Even as a child, without any real sense or knowledge of race or skin color (my father was black when I was born, that was my normal. My mother was white, that was my normal), I still felt unseen, while somehow also feeling like I was the only thing people saw.

What people saw when they saw me, for a long time, was a cute little girl. Then I was a skinny, freckled adolescent with breasts that were too small for society’s standards and expectations. I mean, literally at dinner in a fairly well lit restaurant a couple weeks ago an older gentleman, looking me in my face not 5 feet away, definitely assumed I was a man.

“Oh, I see I’m no longer the only male in this group!” He said with a chuckle. Luckily, my dear friend Sally (a bestselling published author who I just happened to meet and connect deeply with through a conference, and who you should totally support, by the way - she writes (among other things) hilarious, true-to-life romance fiction), was seated between me and this gentleman and immediately validated my identity when I said to him, “I’m not a sir, sir.”

“What?” He says, to which both Sally and I then repeat, “I’m not a sir,” then giggled about like girls. And just having someone there who had my back like that made me feel seen, validated, and enough.

People assuming my identity has been problematic for me since I was a teen. I remember throwing people off, back in Indiana, with my clothing choices (men’s clothes, to hide the body I was so ashamed of, and which had been abused, therefore disassociated from entirely for a long, long time). And that used to bother me because it feels so dismissive. And then, at some point, this happened so much that I just kind of got used to it (like a lot of people who fit into any minority group, or if you’re a woman (cyst or otherwise)).

Why do people think I’m a dude, when I’m clearly an adult, no body hair, and have a pretty decent lady-like shape? Because I don’t wear the clothing that society deems more-appropriate or “lady-like.” I wear baseball caps, my head is shaved on the sides, and I don’t usually wear make up. For a long time, like a lot of women, my sense of worthiness, of enoughness, was woven into and hung onto me being lady-like and doing the things “women” like to do. Some of those things being men. Doing a lot of things I didn’t want to do.

Photo by Ibrahim Rifath on Unsplash

You see this, right? This trail of tears, of ghosts, of ash, of what cannot be changed? This is my story. And for a long time, I despised this story.

I fucking loathed it. As a teen, I would sit in the bathtub, praying to turn into a different person. Literally. I would make what I thought were “concoctions” from lotions and soaps and conditioners and whatever else was in there, slather it all over me, body shame the shit out of myself while I did so and prayed to be someone else.

There were many, many times I didn’t want to be alive anymore.

Dr. Brené Brown says this about being enough:

“We live in a culture of never enough: Never good enough, skinny enough, popular enough, never enough Twitter followers,…

And there’s only one way out of scarcity and that is enoughness. At some point, we just need to say “enough”: I am enough. What I‘m doing is enough.

It’s about waking up in the morning and saying: No matter what gets done and how much is done and how it’s done, I’m enough and I’m worthy of belonging and love and joy.”

So, to follow that trail all the way back, I can see patterns, cycles, mistakes and victories. I understand, now, why for about 20 years of my life, I’ve vacillated between incredible delight and overwhelming disgust while having sex with my partners, partners that I cared about deeply. And I couldn’t connect in the way we humans need to connect in order to thrive because I felt so disgusted with myself that I was gay.

No one should be made to feel so disgusting (especially by parental figures or family members) they can’t even fully engage and be present (in fucking private, by the way) in what is a deeply important and necessary part of life (literally any life) - we don’t shame people for taking a shit (if you do, you’re a fucking asshole), why do we shame each other for things we cannot control?

Because someone before us was told they weren’t enough and that message got passed down, generation after generation, right into our blood. We’ve been conditioned to think we aren’t enough.

But worse, some of us believe we aren’t enough.

This shouldn’t be true, and it saddens me to know that it is, but it turns out, being your authentic self in the face of a fearful, demoralized society is a very real and divine act of courage.

So, fuck society.

Call me sir. Call me ma’am. Call me cracker, call me an asshole or a bitch or a dyke, a cunt, a beaver-eater, a crybaby, crazy, overly emotional, overly sensitive, too masculine…

I am enough.

What if we believed we were enough, just as we are, right now, in this moment?

In this short paper, published in in 2021 in Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization”, by Edlinger, et. al., this idea of “enoughness” is expanded upon:

“A feeling of enoughness, of having and being enough, is based on the subjective perception of a moment as adequate. In a sense, this means to view it independently from alternatives and potential, simply for what it is. [In a] moment of enoughness, what or how something was before or what it could be is irrelevant…

“Enoughness celebrates singularity: it is what it is, simply for what it is – not for what it is not, nor for what it could be. This is the acknowledgement of an intrinsic value that is not subject to any standard but its own…Intrinsic value is not the outcome of measurement. It is not an outcome at all; it is inherent to a situation.”

I made it to this moment.

I made it to here.

You made it to here.

We can do it again.

We have intrinsic value because we are.

I’ve already begun changing my inner beliefs and my external life. I’ve found some inner peace in the last few weeks that I haven’t felt in a long, long time. I have a level of self-acceptance that I’m okay with. I’m not proud of it, yet, but I’m a work in progress (like my anti self-sabotage blueprint).

I am enough.

You are enough.

“Why should we worry about what others think of us, do we have more confidence in their opinions than we do our own?”

-Brigham Young

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