Sufficient

Is there ever a time when we feel that we are enough, just as we are? I don’t feel sufficient. My mother told me I was not; my husband told me I was not; I had a string of boyfriends that cheated on me and told me implicitly that I was not enough. Is it that I am not actually sufficent or am I just looking in all the wrong places all the time? How is it that I am so misguided so often?

I have a day, now and then, where I feel like I am okay – for a WHOLE day! Where I don’t feel like I have failed myself, my children or someone else. These days are not as close together as I wish that they were however. And I don’t know how to turn off the hamster wheel on the other days to stop the feelings of inadequacy flowing in. Sometimes it lasts for days on end, other days it lasts for a couple of hours.

I have been advised on numerous occasions to learn to be with myself – to enjoy my own company. But being by myself is hard as the thoughts come in and flood my mind and then I go around and around. I can’t just “be” on some days. I have to distract my mind. A lot. To quieten the voices of dissension and questioning and querying in my brain. I have to drown them out else they make me crazy and unsettled.  I end up pacing my home – round and round.

Ah – the level of crazy. Do we all have it? Where does normal lie? Where does the traumatised brain and life time of conditioning end and the in-born crazy start? How do I stop the need to prove that I am enough? How do I stop the craziness that drives my behaviour when I feel like I am not enough?

I know that when I feel insufficient and don’t know how to get around this, that the person it relates to at that point in time becomes a “target” if you will. They get all of my nuttiness. I think I must be like a plague. And then when I still feel like I am not enough with that person, I then push them out. Right out. Stop all communication and contact. Why you may ask? Perversely, the innate desire is that they will then want back in, which in my crazy brain proves to me that perhaps I am enough. They value me enough to want back in, to fight for a part of my life. Invariably, that insane behaviour fails me. Obviously. Normal people don’t think like this or behave like this.

As I read what I have said, I shake my head at the madness of it all. My rational mind screams – what the heck? My heart just says that I wish I was enough that someone would just fight for me. That someone would just love me as I am. That I can be enough as a partner and can be enough as a lover and woman and girlfriend. I know that I should be enough for myself without any outside validation. But I am not. And I don’t know how to fix that.