One Mom’s Itchy Butt #7

I woke up in a bad mood today.  There is legitimately no reason that I can think of to be in this bad mood, but here I am. “I feel stuck”

I’ve had enough of feeling this way, yet I feel like I do not do enough.  I’ve been working a lot on healing and balancing my chakras.  All of this is good, but of course I say, it’s not good enough.  I still don’t feel better.  My moods are still up and down, and I still let everyone, including my children, affect too much.

Do you ever feel like a fraud? Almost desperate in your attempt to “cover up” how completely clueless and sucking-at-life you are? When was the last time you felt good enough?

When did so many of us become not good enough? What does enough even mean?

In all reality, we all set the bar in terms of the word enough.  It’s really a matter of how high that bar is set, and who do you truly let set the bar? In Yoga, she said, “open your heart and surrender to it.”  I’ve been journaling/talking to myself with “What do I need today?” because I’m tired of ignoring myself.  Still, “Am I doing enough ___? I’m not ____ enough. I don’t have enough ___.”

When I got quiet after yoga, I felt “enough is enough”.  I’m tired of choosing suffering.  As you begin journeying inwards, it is a painful process.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.  Like peeling apart an onion, it’s a lot of tears, and it sucks.  I have gotten to the point several times where I’ve exasperatedly wondered why the hell I even started doing this in the first place.

It all started with Socrates, “Know Thyself.”  I had no idea who I was, what interested me, or what made me happy.  We’re constantly told that we need xyz to be enough of anything.  Even in the self-help world, if you want to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to listen to someone else teach you to help yourself, you can, and when you finish, they’ll have another course or book or workshop to help you even more.

The problem I have is if you are following someone else’s path, you’re still not following your own.  It’s a good guide, much like (to me) religion is.  They are guideposts to help you learn your true self, because you are the most important person in the world (like everyone else).  If you don’t know yourself, you cannot truly love yourself, nor can you honor yourself.

Honoring myself – by either giving myself praise, or protection with boundary setting is one of my biggest challenges.  The amount of times I have said “I don’t want to do this , but…” or allowed someone to dump bullshit on me, or make me feel less? It’s impossible to count.  Without boundaries, I get bombarded, because my default is that everyone is more important than me.  I struggle placing me first, as I struggle with acknowledging my successes as much as I focus on my failures.

How about news? social media? parenting articles? Every magazine, commercial, etc. is hinged upon telling you enough doesn’t exist.  People make a lot of money telling us how we don’t have enough and we are not good enough. We and our kids have been raised in this crap.   Unsurprisingly, depression, anxiety, and suicide rates are going up.  I get that we all want crap.  Trust me, I blow money like Monica Lewinsky blows… wow…old times. Lately, I’ve been meditating on wanting “just enough” of everything but wisdom and love.

My friend IM’d me recently and said “Stop yearning for love outside yourself.  Yearn for yourself more.  Find yourself in the chaos, because you are the chaos in your world.” I am at a difficult spot in my journey. I choose to accept or reject thoughts, emotions, and words, and this is empowering, but it is paradoxically humbling.  Everything I do is casting pebbles in a pond.  Those ripples have consequences for me and anyone I interact with.  Yet we all have the power to stop the ripples.

I kept pushing, trying to find peace, trying to find ___.  Enough.  Every week, I work to focus on different healing thoughts/mantras/practices.  In truth, the first person I need to set a boundary with is me.  I have had enough of fighting with myself and the negativity I allow. In reality, all of this is a waste of time if, in every breath, I do not commit myself to surrendering to my needs, and allowing my needs to trump everyone else’s wants.  As a Mom, you have multiple needs to address, but my favorite saying is “You have to put on your own oxygen mask, before you can help anyone else.” Seems like the very first step in setting good, healthy boundaries, is honoring that you are enough, with no modification. In this very moment, you are and have all you need.

This week, I am enough, and I am very thankful for it.