I Am Enough.

Today I am enough.

Sorry, I need to repeat that: Today, right now, I am enough.

I forget this daily. I spend days on end telling myself how inadequate I am, how much I have failed by not being brave enough, strong enough, daring enough, enough enough. So I am here to remind myself that I am a spiritual being having a human experience and being human is: hard. When we add up all the bad that happen we forget to sprinkle in the good. The bad keeps rolling in a loop inside of my head and I get tired of stuffing, of getting up and saying I’m fine and pushing through another day when inside of me lives a thousand words of emotions that never get to come out. Why do we live this way? Yesterday I didn’t go to work. I just couldn’t. When one of my friends asked me at work if I was ok I admitted to not being ok and admitted the stress I am under and the anxiety I am feeling because of it. My eyes teared up but I felt a huge relief of anxiety telling the truth.

The truth will set us free. As cliche as that sounds it is true. When I stop pretending, even to myself, that I am not ok I feel a relief come over me. The problem is that I forget this fundamental truth and I fall into a loop of suffering. How often do we say we are fine when someone asks us how we are? I know I do it all of the time. We don’t want to burden others or complain or even hear ourselves talk about the same afflictions we’ve talked about for years. But these are our teachers. Fear is my teacher, anxiety is my teacher, pain is my teacher as well as joy and spirituality.

Each of us is unique but we are also very much the same in that we all experience suffering in some form. Joy we can share, we fill our Facebook’s and Instagram accounts with all the pictures and stories of the joy in our lives but the suffering we hide from each other. Why? Buddhism is very clear about suffering being a “normal” part of life. Also normalized is the truth that obtaining enlightenment is a goal but not something judged. Even the Dalia Lama admits to his humanness.  Here in America we tend to want to cure everything with medicine or self help books or whatever the next billion dollar industry is giving out as false hope to the masses. We are so fixated on curing our suffering that we will buy any cure with promises of “a normal life”. We want this cure because we are shamed into feeling that suffering means we are weak and less valuable. But the truth is we are all suffering! It’s a normal part of life and trying to push it out of our lives is like chewing food and not swallowing. Joy does not exist without suffering. We would not be able to feel one without the other.

Normalizing all forms of suffering is the key to eradicating the shame that exists in having it in the first place. I know that for myself having a panic disorder/agoraphobia since I was 17 has impacted my life greatly. It’s not the fear that has impacted it as much as the shame I have felt around it. Almost 23 years later and I am less consumed with shame but it is the shame that always begins my decent into darkness. I feel inadequate and child like because I cannot get rid of my fears. I beat myself up in my head that I could have been so much more by now, that I have failed because I have not been able to “get over” this suffering of mine. The stories go on and on.

My dear brother died a year ago at the young age of 41. You could say it was the fatal car accident or the late stage alcoholism he was entering but I believe it was because of shame. See, he was molested at a young age and he kept that to himself. He started to drink and use drugs shortly after that in his early teens. When I was at his memorial I found his journals and the first one I opened was written a few years ago. In large, loopy and intoxicated sentences he spewed from his mind the torment he had suffered from for most of his life. He suffered from shame and blamed himself for that happening to him. He kept it to himself and used alcohol and drugs as a way to dull out the suffering because he was so ashamed.

I believe that the key to suffering well is to take shame out of our lives. To suffer with pride and to find those around us that suffer similarly and share stories and gain strength from the kinship of our sameness. I truly believe that my brother would have never died if he could have been able to release his shame or have never felt it at all. I am so hopeful to keep learning to live in a world where I can be a part of normalizing our suffering, where I can be free to be imperfect and to be better because of it.

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