Not Enough
"The fear in this case is that if we are allowed and encouraged to be who we really are, that who we are will not be enough. Our not-enough-ness can come in many forms: not enough to be loved, to be safe in the world, to be respected, to be what we are expected to be, to matter, and on and on. Because of this fear, we build a false self, a version of ourselves that we believe will be enough to get us what we need — make us safe in the world. Feeling enough then must continually involve effort and some alteration to who we actually are. The catch, however, is that we cannot gain a true sense of enough-ness when that sufficiency is built by and upon a false self.
"The antidote to our fear of not being enough is not more self'-improvement, more trying, but rather — counter-intuitively — to stop trying. Stop trying to be enough, to be a better version of ourselves. In order to feel enough, we must give ourselves permission to meet, and ultimately, be our authentic self, as it is. In so doing, our very sense of enough, what it feels like and what it means, begins to transform. We discover that the non-negotiable characteristic of enough-ness is that our true self be the one who is living it; we are the mandatory ingredient in the recipe for enough-ness. Any sense of enough-ness that is generated by way of a false self is useless in healing our fears of inadequacy. Only by showing up in our life as who we truly are, can we genuinely absorb the enough-ness that we create. Furthermore, the results that we produce via a manufactured self become not only unusable for self-esteem, but unsatisfying. The external approval we accomplish — by refashioning our truth and repackaging ourselves — ceases to offer contentment or fulfillment. Eventually, 'being' and 'enough' birth an 'is' between them to become: being is enough."
