Not enough.
It is fascinating how these two words pervade our lives, whether it is ‘I am not enough’ or the ‘world is not enough’ or some other version of it.
It is one thing to know and talk about this abstractly. It is another to see and feel it in how we move through the world. So, I will share how it lives in me.
My sense of not enough drives me to achieve and contribute to the world, to show my best self to others, to be productive and disciplined, to optimize, and to plan. It motivates me to gain knowledge, strive for excellence, and support others. It makes me value belonging and the importance of seeing and being seen.
It also fuels my harshness towards myself, my sense of superiority, and my envy or critique of others. It evokes my self-doubt and smallness. It constrains me, making me feel rigid and trapped. It grows my disappointment with the world, as if I’m in a never-ending losing battle against it. It triggers my despair, anguish, and fatigue, and eventually my escapism and numbing.
It shows up everywhere. It is like I’m wearing ‘not-enough’-tinted glasses that color my entire experience of the world and myself. And I’m still learning the nuanced ways it manifests in my life.
I’m curious, how does not enough live in you?
The incomplete Zen ensō circle alludes to the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness
It is easy simplify this experience into good/bad and right/wrong upon noticing its limits. To quickly condemn our not enough-ness and work tirelessly to fix it, only to continue the same narrative by doing so. I felt the temptation even in writing this post. “Here are 5 ways to conquer your sense of not enough and feel whole!”
But there is so much richness in our sense of not enough. Our own flavor of it shapes our values, purpose, strengths, and gifts. We can appreciate the ‘exquisite intelligence*’ of our younger selves who built strategies to keep us safe from the lack of wholeness we felt. We can feel the beauty of our common humanity in our shared experience of not enough. We can marvel at how our growth towards wholeness is a journey of a lifetime, not an end point to be achieved but rather a constant unfolding. As we do so, we can see how we/the world is whole and enough in its not enough-ness.
When I embrace my sense of not enough and all the ways it shows up as part of my wholeness (rather than reject it in order to achieve wholeness) my system relaxes at a deep level. There is nothing to fix. I am enough as I am. I believe it is this paradox that will most help us in our ongoing unfolding of wholeness.
How do you relate to your sense of not enough?
* I love the way Thomas Hübl and Terry Real describe the workings of our ‘adaptive child’