Feeling not good enough is useful.

There is safety in believing we are broken, and a lot of us work very hard to ensure life feeds us continual validation of our own insufficiency.  Being not good enough gives us hope and control.

As long as the size of my ass, heft of my bank account, volatility of my character, gracelessness of my social skills, or mundanity of my retorts is holding me back, I live right on the edge of a world I can’t quite access, but that could be full of everything I want and need.  This is a world that other people already enjoy and that I can earn my place in – just as soon as I do the work to fix myself.

It’s comforting because it allows us to believe that a) there is a great and cool world out there just waiting for us to deserve it, b) every person except us has successfully found a place in it, so that’s a thing, and c) it is within our control to decide when and if we get there ourselves.  Hope and control.  Aside from the obvious downside of feeling like a failure and continually undermining ourselves, it’s a pretty comfy place to be.

Until good things happen and mess it all up

But then something or somethings turn up and make it really hard to believe you aren’t alright.  Perhaps in the middle of your fat, stinky, ugly, goofy-looking, underfunded, not so clever life, somebody amazing turns up, sees all of your mess – and decides you are fucking wonderful and that they are going to love you like crazy, not in spite of how you are, but because of every bit of it.  Maybe at the same time, you are breaking through obstacles at your job and watching people around you thrive and grow, giving you thanks as they go.  Maybe your hair is kind of cool some days and your dog makes people smile and smart people laugh at your jokes.  Maybe, objectively, signals are kind of pointing to the possibility that you aren’t so bad really.

Some of us will double down at this point and either spin the story against ourselves, look for a conspiracy theory, or simply undermine the progress and harmony that is flowing.  Then we comfortably return to tortured business as usual and the struggle we already know.

But when you can’t fool yourself anymore, something else happens.  You are faced with the challenging idea that maybe you are plenty good enough.  Right now.  Just how you are.  And all the ways you have been and will be.  You are lovable.  You are competent.  You are interesting.  You are valuable.  You are connected.  You are a little work of art.  Oh hooray!  Type it up and slap it over a picture of a beach and get that bitch up on Pinterest!

But wait!  Don’t ride away on your unicorn yet!  Because there’s something Glinda the Good Witch didn’t tell you.  That shit is surprisingly terrifying.  There is a reason we work so hard to avoid it.

Get this:  If you are good enough and always have been, that flips reality on its head.  You have to change your world view a lot to make room for it.

The freaky reality twisters you have to deal with if you accept the premise that you are good enough:

1. Life is full of struggle. If you aren’t the problem, it means something else is at the root of it.  That means you can’t do fuck all about the struggle of life – ever.  It just is what it is.  End of story.  All you get to do is take this or leave that.  You can’t fix away the struggle.
2. If you accept that you are pretty ok, you have to deal with the remaining reality that other people can behave really awfully for reasons you can’t control or understand. People really do suck sometimes and you didn’t cause it, nor can you change it.
3. You are already in the magical world you’ve been waiting for. This is it.  You aren’t on the outside of anything and you never were.  This is all you get.
4. Not perpetually fixing yourself frees up a lot of time, energy, and resources. You now have the responsibility to figure out what you are going to do with all that life that you used to keep turned inward in self-recrimination and remodeling.  Now you have the burden of needing a purpose.
5. And then suddenly you realize that not very many people around you think they are good enough. You’re going to largely be alone in this.  Insecurity, narcissism, self-loathing, fear, disconnection from others – most everyone around you is slowly dying on a terrifying hamster wheel that they think of as life, while deep inside they are waiting for something that feels like actually being alive to start.  And just like that, by default you are the grown up in the room and people and things that used to makes sense to you fade away.
6. If all these things are true and you’ve relinquished the control of being broken and admitted that you can’t do much about anything, then you are off the hook. You can live life however you want because whatever you do a) is just fine, and b) doesn’t make much of a difference.

So how do you know if you are good enough?

Let me save you $4 on the Cosmo with the quiz in it and let’s sort this shit out right now.  I won’t coddle you and tell you that everyone is good enough, because some people really aren’t and we all know it.  However, those people generally don’t care that they suck, so odds are good just asking the question gives you the answer.

But let’s do the exercise anyway.  It goes like this:

Would you tolerate you if you weren’t you and had to deal with you?

Most of us don’t expect perfection out of the people around us.  We expect some percentage of decency and competence based on the relationship, importance of that person’s function for us, and how much they care and try.  Some people we expect very little from.  You smiled and made my coffee how I like it.  You’re perfect.  But even at the top of the range, maybe a spouse or business partner – we expect maybe 70-80% tops.

Are you 70% good enough?  If you aren’t, then you have some soul-searching and maybe researching to do.  Either you are expecting something bananas out of yourself or you need to buck up and get a little better at a few things.  That’s character development and people have been doing it since we crawled out of the oceans.  It’s a great thing to decide to improve yourself and the library is full of biographies of how great people have taken it on.

But even if you need to file down a few edges here and there (we all do) or even build on an extra wing to the house of your person, odds are good you have at least 70% firing for you.  And that is as much as you would ask for from anyone.

So it’s your choice – accept that you are pretty fucking cool and deal with the massive but satisfying inconvenience of it, or get busy psyching yourself out and messing up all the good stuff you have going on.  Because I think you are pretty cool.