I am Not Good ENOUGH

My life started by listening to one statement which is: “be a good girl”. I never realised this statement transforming my personality to a thought which eventually started to haunt me and that was: “I am not good enough”. We live, grow and build our life around the thought of being good enough for someone. When “good” started vanishing and “enough” starts echoing in loudspeaker within us, that is when we misinterpret the whole concept of our very being. Focusing on the enough makes us forget being good and the whole perception of becoming a “good human being” starts to revolve around proving someone that “I am good” which then becomes a question in itself: “am I not good enough?”  and slowly transforms to a statement becoming a reality which we keep repeating to ourselves: “I am not Good Enough”.

When I serve food to my daughter, I ask her “is this enough?” I stop serving the moment she says enough. Somedays when I don’t stop, she tells me, you are behaving like granny. She never stops when I say enough. We interpret that as their love. Grandparents always feel it is never enough. With food we can still manage but there are so many other aspects of life where parents and grandparents go above and beyond just to make sure what their kids have is “more than enough”. We never understood the meaning of this word in our life and hence keep revolving around this throughout our life.

Good-Better-Best were the three forms of the adjective which was taught in school and made us realise good is the basic quality and our goal should always be to achieve the best. Then came an ad in the 90s which had a tag line “Better than the Best”. At every instance of our life we are made to realise good is never good enough and this eventually builds resentment in our actions. Recently when we went to a restaurant, the chef came and asked us was the food good or excellent? As a normal expression we told it was good. Then he insisted and asked us again informing us that good is normal, expecting us to say it was excellent. He was happy when we agreed to what he wanted us to say. We are losing the sanctity of the words we use. Good is not normal and excellent is not something which is used very often. But for the chef his performance is measured against these words and hence it matters to him for a random customer to just say “it is excellent”. We are doing the same with ourselves. We just want to hear superlative expressions from our family and the society because that is the affirmation which we are made to believe adds value to our action.

Along with parents our education system is a major contributor to this feeling developing within every individual “I am not good enough”. My generation had a proud moment and a great sense of achievement when we secured a distinction or something above 90% in the boards but in the present time even 99% is not good enough because someone else has 99.2% or 99.6% or even 100%. We keep feeding ourselves and the generation to come with always wanting more which can be good if we know when to say ENOUGH. Unfortunately, we have only learnt to expect more from everything we have, and we get.  

Dream – Goal – Greed, these are phases of our achievement which we fail to see the difference when we plan to achieve. Fantasy in the dream, reality in the goal makes us feel good when we achieve it. When the same takes a leap into greed is when we don’t say enough because then, nothing we have feels good. We want the best which blurs the reality making us impaired to visualize right and wrong. Wanting the best is not wrong, but what are we comparing it with makes the difference. If we work towards making our own today better than our yesterday, then we are in the right track. Look around you, see what is good in others and learn from them, see the mistakes others do and improve yourself by experience and observation but never fool yourself by setting a target to prove something to somebody. When life becomes a detective series then something should always go wrong for you to prove something is right. Our life is beyond wasting it to prove something wrong to someone. Focus on making things right and automatically you will start realising your dream goals and greed will be caught inside an airtight bottle.

Affirmation of good should come from within. When the expectation is with others, over a period of time we forget that even though the focus is on good, we shifted our focus to “enough”.  We stop doing and being good because we feel the affirmation we receive, is not good enough. My mom sometimes gets upset because I did not react to certain situation as per her imagination. I did not show my happiness and excitement like she expected me to. When external factors are made responsible for our own feelings, then goodness in life starts to feel like it is not enough. When I do my best and still someone says you could do better, that is when you start feeling that no matter how much you do, there is no way that is going to be enough for them. This is the end point which we should avoid reaching to. Doing good or being good is not a goal to achieve, it is a habit we should cultivate. The reward for this comes to us in various forms but it should never be expected to come from someone who sees this qualitative nature measured in a quantitative manner. We see people around us feeling depressed, angry, frustrated, demotivated which is a result of the need for validation of their good and bad by others. Learn to identify what is right and wrong, what is good and bad, then the validation lies within you.

I am good or I am not good should always help us take the step forward in life to become better. When good is followed by enough, we stop because we are blinded to see beyond. Never say enough when you know what is right, wrong, good, and bad. Always learn to improve yourself from where you started. When the world is validating your answer sheet, there are millions of eyes, ears and mouth doing it at the same time but when you are validating yourself, you see, you speak, and you listen. Each and every word, expression and feeling is loud and clear. Just like how we have noise cancellation headphones, we also need the same technology within us to see our own good.

When I am good, I have scope to become better and best someday.
When I am good enough, I limit myself with being enough.
When I am not good, I still have scope to become good, better and best someday.
When I am not good enough, I wait for someone to say don’t stop being not good.

Motivation to become better when we are good and not good is always expected to come from others and then we start saying enough to ourselves. But what lies within us is more than enough to make us move beyond what others want to see in us. We live a life which we make for ourselves. We have to choose:  do we say good, better, best or do we choose to say now this is “Enough”.