Learning what it means to be enough and how to write through grief
Last week, I suggested writing through accomplishments, goals, and things that bother you to declutter your mind. The thing bothering me lately is not feeling like I am enough. No matter what I do or how hard I work, it feel like I fall short, and I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. So I wrote about it, and I’ll share at the end of this post. The other thing I was thinking about this week was grief. Not my own, but the grief people I care about are going through.
Then I realized that grief and “not enough” are deeply tangled. We grieve in “not enough” language without even realizing it. I didn’t say enough. We didn’t have enough time. I didn’t try hard enough. That’s what’s been on my mind lately — and it’s what led me to today’s prompts.
Don’t stop reading if you think you’re not grieving. Grief comes in more forms than we usually admit. I’m focusing on three, and I think it’s important to learn how to work through grief in all forms so that when big grief hits, and it will, we will have developed coping methods.
Death is the most difficult because it’s permanent and irreversible. It’s also inevitable. We can’t change it or avoid it, but we can learn to move through it so it doesn’t consume us. If you’ve recently lost a person or a pet, this is your topic today.
Distance can be physical — you or someone you love moved far away — or psychological — a rift, a withdrawal, a slow drift. Sometimes the distance is even your own doing, but that doesn’t make the grief less real. I believe every time we gain something, we lose something, and the reverse is also true. There is balance, but we have to search for it, and writing can help us find it.
Disappointment is grieving something you never had. For a long time, I wanted a baby, but it took years. I was teaching high school, watching teenagers grieve unwanted pregnancies, wondering how I could miss someone I’d never met. But I did, and this grief was powerful and real. Other examples: a spouse you can’t seem to find, an elusive promotion, a career or goal that keeps slipping just out of reach. The grief is real regardless of the cause.
So why write about something that makes us feel sad? Studies show that writing about loss for as little as 15–20 minutes a day for as little as four consecutive days reduces emotional distress and strengthens immune function. Researchers suggest that naming and describing a painful experience gives us cognitive control over it — shifting us from feeling the grief to thinking about it. That’s where healing begins.
This Week’s Writing Prompts.
- Who or what are you grieving? (Is your grief caused by death, distance, or disappointment?)
- List one to three things you miss or want most about this person, thing, or concept.
- How was/would your life (be) richer, fuller, better with this?
- What are you gaining or learning without this?
- In what ways do you already have enough, even without this?
- How can you keep this alive or reimagined through your own actions, substitution, or creative reinterpretation?
(If the thing you miss most about a person is her laughter, can you find opportunities to share your laughter with others in her honor? Can you find ways to make other people feel as encouraged and loved as he made you feel? Or, if you want something you don’t have, think about how you believe this would make you feel, and seek that feeling in other ways.)
If something shows up on the page that you think could help someone else, share it in the comments. Because sometimes our “not enough” is exactly enough for someone else.
Enough by Konni Atencio
Enough. What a strangely versatile word. A unit of measure without standards or guidelines. A word flowing between the shores of positive connotation and negative.
The definition is simple: “Sufficient without excess,” but “sufficient” is entirely uncalibrated. A constantly moving target. Add comparison with others to the equation, and I find myself questioning my own definition of sufficient. Is my idea of sufficient good enough or should I be constantly striving for someone else’s sufficient? Or am I actually striving for someone else’s excess, because if you think about it, it’s usually excess that makes us feel like we are insufficient. The elaborate vacation photos, the glowing successes, the spectacular milestones filling our feeds. Maybe it’s “sufficient” we have a problem with which makes this less of a striving issue and more of a contentment issue.
We are left to decide, for ourselves, several times a day what constitutes enough. You must decide if you’ve had enough food. Will you leave hungry or over-indulge? What is enough exercise? Will you push yourself to exhaustion or be content with moving your body in the sunshine while inhaling fresh air? Did you get enough sleep? Enough solitude? Enough socializing? Did you do enough work? Did you give enough? Care enough? Listen enough? And every day is a little different, so this is a long way from an exact science.
Think about the number of everyday expressions using the word “enough.”
“No, thank you. I’ve had enough.” This is an expression of satisfaction. I’ve had enough food, enough wine, enough fun for one evening. I am full. I am content.
“I’ve had enough!” A limitation. A line in the sand. I will tolerate no more of this negativity. An assertion. A boundary.
Parents say it to children when they’re getting wound up. “That’s enough.”
And then people say to their therapists, “I never got enough…” Usually followed by some sort of psychological nourishment like love, time, attention, credit, value. This “enough” is buried deep, often in shame, as though someone else’s shortcomings are an accurate measure of our worth.
This can lead to the feeling of “I’m never enough.” And that, too, is often buried beneath mounds of bravado, arrogance, and chipped shoulders.
Oddly enough, an abundance of lavish praise and high expectations can lead to a similar question: “Why am I never enough?” Perfectionism. Unrealistic goals. The pressure building like lava, ready to explode if we fail to achieve perfection. Or if we fail the people we love, or the people we work for. This one verges on arrogance, perhaps. Because the world won’t collapse if we are simply “good enough.” And yet we’ve convinced ourselves that it might.
Maybe we do this because “good enough” feels like settling or quitting the race half a mile before the finish line.
But who decided that your best has to be flawless perfection and a first-place trophy? Why do some of us not know it’s okay to sign up for a race just for fun, with no intention of winning and not a care for who sees us cross the finish line at the back of the pack with the people who are smiling more than sweating? Who told you that the world is going to dissect your every move, looking for flaws? Maybe no one told you this. Maybe it’s the thorn in your side that you must remove and bandage with gratitude for who you are and what you have instead of always needing more.
Maybe failing to appreciate “good enough” and failing to believe we are “enough” just the way God made us is ingratitude and self-punishment. Maybe it’s just too much worry about self. It’s like painting a wall. In the moment, you notice every tiny flaw, but step back and give the wall a minute to breathe, a little distance and perspective, and it’s good enough. It’s great, in fact, when you stop hyper-fixating on its flaws.
Sometimes it feels good to say “enough” and to stop pushing and fighting. We say things like, “fair enough” when something is not perfectly fair, not precisely balanced on the scales of justice, but close enough that I’ll give in to what you’re asking. I’ll bend because I’m not too arrogant to see someone else’s logic. And fighting is exhausting.
Sometimes “enough” feels right and peaceful. Like permission to be okay with who we are today and what we have accomplished. Because there are a whole lot of people in this world who don’t have enough. Not enough food, money, shelter, love, or safety. For those of us who have far too much, I think the answer is to be grateful and to find every opportunity we can to share our abundance with others.
As for this topic, “Enough is enough”!
