E
Enough - Equity
Enough
Good enough sounds like settling, like half-assing, like giving up before the finish line. Most of us aren’t struggling because we’re aiming too low. We’re drowning because we were never told where the shoreline is.
Every corner of our culture whispers that more potential, more growth, more development is the only direction worth traveling.
Underneath it all, I wonder if there’s a still, small voice wondering…
Am I enough? As I am? Without upgrades, productivity hacks, performance reviews, and unrelenting self-improvement?
Enough is not the end of growth; it’s the ground growth stands on.
It’s not quitting; it’s the condition that makes stretching ourselves possible.
It’s not a permanent address; it’s a rest stop on the journey.
It’s easy to breathe around people who recognize they are enough. They’re the ones who laugh in face of a perfection that says, “You should be there already,” standing firm in the knowledge that they’re allowed to be right where they are without condition.
Enough doesn’t cancel ambition; it just unhooks it from shame. Enough is the antidote to the quiet panic that says if you stop, everything will fall apart and everyone will see who you “really” are.
A little secret… the game is rigged. There’s no way to achieve an ever-moving goal. There’s no one more achievement, one more sacrifice, one more round of over-functioning that will satisfy your hunger. If there’s always more to do, then whatever we’ve done is, by definition, not enough.
When we’re brought up on a steady diet of “be helpful,” “be quiet,” “be impressive,” “be useful” it’s hard to find that tentative resting place of enough. But it’s important that we do.
Enough cuts through the noise and the bullshit of the industrial improvement machine. It suggests that being a person, with a story and a body and a history and a future, is… enough.
Not everything.
Not finished.
Just… enough.
Enough isn’t complacency. It’s simply the ground we stand upon to survey the world and choose our next step wisely rather than blindly.
See: perfectionism, identity, grace, rest, shame.
Entitlement
Entitlement is what happens when we mistake wanting to feel seen with feeling like we’re owed attention. In these latter moments, our wounds open and our loneliness and anger and pain burst forth and vomit all over the people around us.
It’s not pleasant but it does the trick. People pay attention.
Nowadays people pull out their phones and record our entitled moments. It’s almost as if they’re entitled to police our behavior.
If it’s egregious, then maybe they are. Maybe we deserve to be shamed when we treat others poorly. But, maybe we’re just having a shitty day, week, month, year and it explodes at the wrong time. Maybe we’re already ashamed and we can’t take anymore so we take it out on the person in front of us.
That doesn’t excuse our behavior, it just puts it in its place.
Equally insidious is the quiet entitlements we all perform. It’s the microdosed feelings of being owed something because of our circumstances. We grumble; we take; we guilt. All in the name of getting what we believe we’re owed.
The world owes us nothing. In fact, the world could care less about us as individuals. But, the people around us could care. The things we do could matter. It’s our choice in the end. Relate or push away. Be a kind of smug self-righteous right, or be willing to listen and empathize.
The antidote for entitlement is responsibility, I think. Or maybe it’s relationality. Or maybe it’s gratitude. Perhaps it’s all three or none of the above.
Obviously if we knew, the world would be better off already.
See: equity, enough, shame, privilege, expectations, resentment.
Equity
The thing about interstates and smooth roads is that they can lull us into a false sense of security. There are times when I will drive from one place to another and remember nothing about the journey it took to get there.
The roads were smooth, the traffic gentle, and “poof!” I made it.
When the roads we travel on are paved, equity can feel like hitting a pothole at 50 miles an hour. It’s an unexpected, bone jarring, axle-bending, tire-popping annoyance. It’s enough to make us angry and scared, not that we were lulled into a false sense of security, but at the pothole reminding us that the road isn’t always smooth for everyone.
The thing is not everyone gets a smooth road to drive on. Some of us ride on pothole filled back roads, others on smooth but dusty country lanes, still others are stuck in traffic as construction blocks their road while they “pave” it.
Equality would tell us that “hey, everyone has a car, they shouldn’t complain about the roads.”
Equity asks, “how do we get all these people on these different roads traveling with a similar ease to their journeys?”
Sometimes we’ll need to pave roads, sometimes repair them, sometimes we’ll need to knock on doors and ask if they even want the road paved at all.
That’s why it’s so jarring to folx like me who’ve come from blissfully driving my own smooth road. Knowing that my road was paved before I drove it makes me sad and angry that others didn’t have the same things I did. I don’t want to get off the road I’m traveling, and equity doesn’t ask me to.
Instead, it asks me to trust other people when they describe their roads and what would be the best way to fix them.
See: entitlement, boundaries, privilege, harmony, justice, responsibility.