Sometimes your best isn’t good enough.
You still get passed up for that promotion, your house plant still dies, and your essay doesn’t get shortlisted.
In these situations, we turn to negative emotions of blame. He cosied up to the boss more, I’m sure there’s favoritism involved, why didn’t she water the plant, the organisation’s results are rigged.
And when the external is no longer satisfied in holding the blame, we turn to ourselves. I should have brought more gifts, praised them more, worked harder; I should have done it myself, maybe I’m not working hard enough.
These feelings of resentment are unwelcome house guests. Once they arrive, they rarely leave; instead, becoming a part of our personality and embedding themselves deeper within us at every opportunity.
Eventually, they show in our hunched shoulders and second guessing thoughts; in each time we fear getting up on the stage for a speech or hover over the submit button without summoning the courage to actually click it.
It’s not until we hit rock bottom that we realise how these feelings have overtaken us, and the road to recovery seems endless.
That is when we need to apply for that new job, to buy new plants for a vegetable garden, and pick up the pen to write another piece.
Because we started from our best not being good enough for others, but ended up with it not being enough for ourselves.
The new choice to be enough for ourselves, then, is the only way we can learn that being enough for others doesn’t matter in the big picture. There will be people who value you and others who don’t. It’s when you stop valuing yourself is when the problems start.
Because as long as you value yourselves, nothing much matters – it’s all white noise at the end of the day, the muted soundtrack in the movie of your life.
Note: If this sounds hard, welcome to the path. You may feel alone, but there are countless others alongside you, invisible but present. Together, we’re all learning to sit in the director’s seat and make the film of our life.
