I keep coming back to the word.
Not as a limitation. Not in the way I used to hear it, as the thing you said to someone who was asking for too much, as the drawing of a line, as the word that meant: stop here, you have used your share, the remainder is not yours. That was the version of enough I grew up inside, the enough that was a ceiling rather than a ground, the enough that said: this is all you get, be grateful and do not ask for more.
I am learning the other version.
The enough that is a sufficiency, a fullness, a condition of genuine satisfaction with what is present rather than the management of longing for what is absent. The enough of a meal that is actually satisfying, not just filling, actually satisfying, where the body and the appetite find the same answer at the same time. The enough of a morning that has contained what a morning can contain and does not need to be more than a morning in order to have been worth having.
I am enough.
That one is the hardest. I have spent most of my life in the condition of not-quite-enough, of the bar just above where I could reach, of the expertise that was used and the belonging that was withheld and the credential earned and the door that still did not fully open. I internalized the institution’s verdict in the way you internalize things that are repeated long enough and loudly enough, until the not-quite-enough was not coming from outside me anymore but from a voice I had built inside myself that was harder to argue with than any external authority because it knew all my evidence against it and had responses prepared.
I am working on the voice.
I am replacing it, slowly, with a different account. An account that says: you were always enough. Before the credentials and after them. In the contract years and in the years before the contract. On the days when you were competent and praised and on the days when you were exhausted and invisible. Enough is not a destination you arrive at after sufficient achievement. Enough is what you are. It was always what you were. The institution did not have the authority to decide otherwise, and the voice that borrowed the institution’s verdict was wrong, and I am retiring it, formally, with the same administrative quiet with which I retired the rest of the contract.
It is done. I am enough. The word belongs to me now in the version that holds rather than limits. I am keeping it.
