Good Enough

I've spent years trying to be good enough. Good enough for my friends, good enough for my boyfriends, good enough for my family, good enough for myself.

But how does one actually decide when they are good enough? And how does one overcome the feeling that they never will be? 

I've spent most of my life comparing myself to others. I don't know where I picked this up. It's not like my mother, who raised me and my brothers more or less by herself, ever made me feel like I should. As I child, I very rarely heard anything but praise about myself. I was a smart, over achieving, pretty young girl.

I used to hear all the time that the boys would be lining up for me when I got older. But they never did. And though I was intelligent, when I was put into the advanced class, I was never accepted by my classmates and I began to do poorly. I did fine when I went back to my regular class, but that was the first time I began to doubt my intelligence.

Now, it's only fair to note that when I was placed in the advanced class, I'd just been through a very traumatic life event, the suicide of my step-father, whom I was very close to. Maybe I wasn't accepted because I was shy and unwilling to reach out to my fellow students. But that year affected me, even if I was only 10 years old. 

When I was 13, I moved away from the neighborhood I'd grown up in. I had some good friends there and being 13 before the age when 13 year olds had cell phones, we didn't really keep in touch. In my new school, it took a long time for me to find friends, and then when I went to high school, I went to a school away from the people I'd gone to junior high with, thus going through the process again.

After dropping out of high school halfway through my senior year and losing contact with all of my high school friends because of my very controlling boyfriend, I didn't have much left to look back on.

I hated school. All of it. I was good at it, when I wasn't dealing with emotional issues, but I hated it. For some reason, I never felt good enough there. Maybe that's where it started. But now I'm 24. And I'm still not good enough.

I want to look at myself and be proud. I want to look at the people who love me and be happy. I want to have the confidence to find someone who will love me for exactly what I am and never make me doubt whether I'm good enough ever again; but at the same time, I want to find that in myself and not go looking for that affirmation in someone else who may just leave me and take that feeling away all over again. 

I am broken. But maybe I'll find something in myself to make me feel good enough...

"You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting."