The Box I Unintentionally Put Myself In
As a child I was a good student in all the ways — I was a pleasure to have in class, I did my homework every night, and did well on tests. This taught me a few things about the world:
Hard work is rewarded, and it’s important to work hard and do your best.
If I worked hard enough, I could get a perfect result. My standard for myself became getting a 100 on every test, and anything less than that felt not good enough.
Following the rules means you’ll be liked and praised.
It’s preferable to be quiet and not draw attention to yourself.
But as I got older this box of rules became less about school and more about my whole life. I needed to be an A+ everywhere, in all the things.
The things that I put in the box of what was allowed were bad enough, causing me to fall deep into perfectionism and people pleasing for all of my 20s. But it was what got left out of the box that really did the damage. All those parts of myself that existed but weren’t ever allowed to see the light of day. I felt guilty every time I felt angry and would never show signs that I was mad or godforbid talk about being mad. I dreamt of life in which I was queer and had tattoos but didn’t allow myself to live it. I viewed my fatness, pickiness, stubbornness as character defects that needed to be fixed.
Essentially, I walked around all the time with a deep, deep feeling that I wasn't good enough.
As a coach, I see so many of my clients doing this too. Their box might not look the same as mine — maybe their’s is a “good girl” box or a “responsible oldest child” box, but the results is the same. Certain parts get to exist, and other parts get rejected. And at the core, a feeling of not-enoughness.
And what’s the result of all this?
You don’t ask for help because you either don’t feel like you’ve earned it, or you don’t feel like anyone can do it as well as you, or you feel guilty about asking for help when you could technically do it yourself.
You often get stuck in procrastination mode. You have so many ideas of things you want to do or try, but you talk yourself out of them or just keep putting them off.
You’re often putting yourself down and comparing yourself to other people.
You sometimes feel like you’re standing on the sidelines of your life, watching it go past.
You feel resentful and pissed off in your relationships. You do so much for everyone else but you don’t feel appreciated or taken care of in return. It can feel like you don’t even matter, that you’re just there to do the cooking and cleaning and drive everyone around.
The way through is to put everything into the box. Find all those lost parts and add them back in. Give them space to exist, let them know they are allowed.
Once that happens so much becomes possible. You get to build a life that fits you. You trust your decision making. When you start to feel happy, you no longer worry about what bad thing is waiting down the line — you let joy in, you let it be abundant, and you let it fill you up. You’re able to choose your happiness over other people’s comfort. Most of all, you get to be fully yourself.
In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware talks about how one of the top regrets that people have as they come to the end of their lives is that they didn’t have the courage to choose being true to themselves over following expectations.
And I’m constantly thinking of the Glennon Doyle quote from Untamed:
Every time you're given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.
If you do nothing else, please just stop disappointing yourself. Choose yourself every damn day.
P.S. If this topic of “enoughness” really resonates with you, you’ll probably love my book Is It Enough Yet?