Are You Good Enough?

What if you were? Good enough, that is. Just you. Every day, all the time. Good enough. Not  only good enough at writing, good enough at fixing your car, good enough at teaching, good enough at splitting atoms. But just good enough. As being  you.

And what I would like to know is why are there so many people who tell us that we in fact are not good enough? Just being ourselves. People who tell us that what we want to do and what we want to be is not good enough? Why do those people get to be the boss of us? What gives them the right to dictate these beliefs for us?

Because believe you me, we listen to them. To those people who want to see us fail. To those people who are afraid of seeing us soar.

What if.... instead of hearing them say 'you are fat', 'you are stupid', 'you are not good enough' and believing them - letting those words of hurt seep into our souls where it becomes a part of us.... what if instead we said back to them (in the words of my children) "I'm rubber and you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you." And carried on as if those words had never been spoken.

Would we then believe we are good enough? I don't believe we are born believing we are not good enough. All the proof I need for that is watching my children.

I few years ago I went to a workshop where we were working on "opening our hearts".  I really got a lot out of it - I actually wish I could do it again, I'm in a better place now to open my heart than I've been in a long time - but there was one part of this workshop that left me a little upset. There were people having meltdowns all over the place. I went there thinking I had emotional issues (don't we all!) that I wanted to work out -but some of these people were having the kinds of meltdowns I've only ever had in my head.

At one point we were taking turns lying in the center of our small groups and then saying out loud something that we wanted to have, make or be better in our lives. When it got to my turn I said that I wanted to be "good enough". The leader pressured me to come up with a something to be good enough at. I was trying to explain to him (while lying on the ground surrounded by people touching me - not exactly my comfort zone) that that was all I wanted. Just to be accepted as "good enough". That who/what I was and am is "good enough". He kept at me, and I kept on giving the same response. Finally he gave a sigh, they did their little thing and we moved onto the next person.

I felt kind of cheated. Like he had implied that even my desire to be "good enough" wasn't good enough. Although I wished I had made a bigger stink about it to really make my point, it kind of drove home to me the idiocy of my trying to convince someone else to assure me that my good enough was indeed good enough. Who was he to judge that after all?

I am slowly coming to the realization that who I am is good enough. Just as is. Not that I can't use some tweaking, but at the core of who I am - that I am ok. I am a firm believer in personal accountability, but one day on facebook some joke page put up the quote "Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes."

Sometimes I think I have spent too much of my life surrounded by assholes. Thank goodness I"m in not afraid of a good cleanse :-)