I think I have lived the last twenty five years of my life worrying about whether i am good enough


I have decided: I am good enough

Not because anything changed. the same types of jobs. the same types of friends. the same conversations i replay at 2am wondering if i said the wrong thing. i just got tired. tired the way you get tired of a passage in a book you used to think meant something.

Twenty five years is a long time to audit yourself. i kept waiting for someone to hand down the verdict — a promotion, my father's approval before his brain functioning went kaput, penny saying what she meant out loud instead of disappearing into her phone. none of it ever landed as proof. I'd bank it and start the count over the next morning.

So i'm calling it. no ceremony. the jury went home.

What i notice is how much room it leaves.

I stopped working at five today when I usually go until six. During the day I spent an hour doing laundry and dishes without narrating my own performance or worrying about what I was letting slide at work or wondering if I was doing it for Penny or for myself. It didn't matter. I did it because I wanted to do it. I let the kid at the register at Stop and Shop be slow. I looked at the wonder of the conveyor belt instead like I was eight years old.

None of this holds. It is transient, a form of my personality that will be lost tomorrow. I'll probably wake up tomorrow doing the math again. The math on my life and what I need to get done today and how I can best go about doing it. The same math as every day.

But today I'm writing it down so there's a record that once i put the pencil down and felt like it was enough.