The Triteness of Saying "You're Enough" (A Love Letter)
I'm enough too (also trite)!
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Hi lovies,
I’m enough. You’re enough. We’re all enough.
It’s a basic self-help message that reassures that we are enough just as we are. You don’t have to be a successful, rich, financier, or the adoptive mother of fifteen children, or an astronaut (a real one, not a fake one), or even a bestselling author.
You, just as you are in your current existence, are enough. It’s about being satisfied, yes, but specifically, being satisfied with yourself. Being happy with what you’ve accomplished, even if that is just managing to get out of bed in the morning. It’s a sentiment designed to keep us from feeling bad, from comparing ourselves to others, to remind us we don’t have to strive, that we are perfect just as we are. It’s a good thing.
And it is also horribly, dastardly banal.
It’s so common and cliched these days that I’d be willing to bet your eyes just glaze over when you read it. Maybe your brain doesn’t even process it. The sentiment is the wallpaper in your bedroom you don’t notice anymore, the magnets on your refrigerator you no longer bother to look at. It’s meaningless.
I’m afraid I tend to roll my eyes and yawn just like the pug in the photo above when I read it these days.
And yet this week I was forced to ponder it anew.
Because going through my old journals, I realized something that at first took me aback: the things I complained about then are the things I complain about now. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Back then (and it’s a long then, spanning years), I obsessed about wanting to be a novelist, (a bestselling one would be nice, too), wanting my body to feel better, free of extra weight and chronic pain, wanting to make more money, wanting to feel more, well, spiritual or maybe just learn to appreciate what I had right in front of me.
I was, shall we say, stunned at how I’m still living the same messages. And discouraged. Ugh, same old, same old. Can’t I ever change? Hard to believe I’ve wasted all this time journaling, not to mention killed all those trees which sacrificed themselves for my paper.
But then I realized something. Reading all that crap I poured onto the page was actually a gift.
Because:
I can change my story.
Not only that, I have changed my story. It’s just that the brain hasn’t kept up. And it hasn’t kept up because change of this sort doesn’t happen all at once. It happens gradually. Day by day, bit by bit.
“Step my step we travel far.” ~ My mother’s favorite quote
As in: making the decision to have knee replacement surgery a year ago and now slowly increasing the number of steps I take every day. (Chip the pug demand himself at least one daily walk.) Which in turn improves my body and my pain. Learning to focus in the moment better instead of turning to scrolling for comfort. And most importantly for our purposes, writing every day.
I am enough. My writing is enough. even if I never get another word published, it’s enough. Doing it is enough. Loving it is enough. That’s the point, after all. Loving what we fill our days with. You know the old quote as well as I do:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” ~ Annie Dillard
So yeah, you are enough. Your writing is enough.
Ack, it actually pains me to say that. But guys, banal and trite as it is, it’s still an important message. Because the truth is, many of us spend our days in a stew of not-enoughness. Feeling less than, not as good, that there’s something wrong with us. And that doesn’t even take into our consideration our writing, which gets baked into the same stew. (Okay, bad metaphor since stew doesn’t usually bake.)
You are enough, more than enough. Your writing is enough, too. Does it help for me to say that? I hope it does, but I’m not sure. I suspect we may all have to come to that conclusion for ourselves.
But I do believe that words are magic. So I’m going to choose to believe that me saying them will start you on that path to believing.
You are enough. Your writing is enough.
Love, light, and good writing,
Charlotte
P.S. Tell me something good about you or your writing or your life.
Articles and Resources
I have it on good authority that my post featuring fountain pens turned several of you into fanatics, so here’s a primer on cleaning them.
My buddy Kevin on how writing is iterative and thus why you should allow your first drafts to be awful messes.
Widen your view, from the always helpful Rick Hanson. (Buddha’s Brain.)
My mid-week post on why I’m throwing out all my journals, part of the inspiration for this love letter.
Books
The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy, by Megan Bannen. I am thoroughly enjoying this romantasy. It’s set in an intriguing different world (without too many weird names or crazy details to track) and it’s got great characters. Also very well-written. Update: Still reading. Still enjoying.
Great Big Beautiful Life, by Emily Henry. I am not an Em Hen superfan, though apparently that makes me a minority on the planet of romance lovers. I’ve read several of her books, one I loved, one I thought was meh, one I, gasp, didn’t finish. But I paid for a virtual event with her that included the book because I was curious about her. (And I wanted the B&N special edition book.) For those of you who don’t know, she’s a mega-bestseller and the release of her latest novel earlier this week was cause for long lines at midnight bookstore celebrations, swag galore, and probably more BookTok videos than there are grains of sand on the beach. I don’t have my hands on the book yet, but I tuned into the interview, prepared to hate-watch. Reader, I was wrong. I came away impressed by Henry’s thoughtfulness and the depth of emotion she brings to her writing. She also seems like a lovely, kind human. And now I can’t wait to get my hands on the book.
Workshops in England and France
Life is crazy here (and everywhere in response). So why not shuck it all and go to England (think swans and the gorgeous garden in which they live and an ancient cathedral with sort of magical Evensongs and a high street bursting with people of all ages and dogs and pubs with fish and chips and mushy peas) to write for a week? I think it’s an excellent idea and I’ll be there to hang out with you. Tons of info, including dates and cost is here. England is easy because they speak the language. Ish.
But there’s also France coming up! We may not speak their language but as long as you give it a whirl (Bon jour is easy to say) you’ll be fine. Find out more on our France page. And seriously, give it a ponder. We’d love to have you accompany us for either workshop.
And if you want a taste of the adventure that awaits with our overseas workshops, you can read my posts about this year here, and here, here, here, and here.
Other places to connect with me:
My website (badly in need of an upgrade)
Our workshop website
My original blog (now for archive purposes only, no longer updated, but damn there are a lot of articles on it).
Sometimes I'm amazed at how stuck I get, and how I actually have to remind myself that it's self-imposed. A friend of mine's grandmother, who was a psychic healer in San Francisco back before that was even a thing, used to say it was like a milk cow crying because it was stepping on its own teat and couldn't figure it out. Kind of old timey but it stuck in my brain. Change is possible in every moment.
I am working on disentangling myself from yardsticking against anyone or anything. No more metrics as weapons on myself or anyone else.