I am doing my best and my best IS enough

If my therapist taught me anything, there were these two ideas:

• Our unhelpful habits are habits because they were once helpful. The limp that stops you from running now might have started to help heal a broken ankle. It is worth your while to be aware of the origin story of your own unhelpful habits. 
• When we are badly hurt, we learn a lesson - we learn 'truths' about the world and ourselves. Sometimes these 'truths' are not actually true. And they might be holding us back.    

In the past two decades (after I left the comfort and safety of parent's home to move to the other part of the world), I had a few hurts and I learnt a ton of (I am gradually realising) unhelpful-and-perhaps-not-even-true truths 

• Firstly, I decided that I hadn't just had a few unlucky breaks, I WAS Unlucky. An being unlucky gave me a right to be resentful and angry and bitter. And if the universe wanted me to behave better, well, it had to do better itself. 
• The second one was that we have to earn love, that we had to hustle to belong. 
• And finally, that if even after doing my best I do not get what I want, then my best is not enough. 

Very slowly I am in the process of unlearning these "truths."

One day I came across the research* that said people who self identify as lucky are lucky, and people who self identify as unlucky have rotten luck. To say it blew my mind and changed the course of my life is an understatement - I still feel like my life took a U turn that day.  

I learnt to hustle for belonging by having to live with relatives who had the emotional intelligence of a 1970s computer, who somehow thought that silent treatment, throwing tantrums and making chore lists is how you make your niece feel welcome and less homesick. All it took was a labrador puppy to teach me that love has nothing to do with convenience, it has nothing to do with sharing chores. I think it might have something to do with being comfortable in your own skin, that translates into a kind of presence, but I am still learning from Chicory everyday. 

Finally, if you have read this blog enough, especially for the past two or five years, you might have come across the word failure. Once, or twice, or maybe a hundred times. And after having been that person who got the marks and the opportunities, to be the youngest in the group, I have felt like a failure recently - and I have felt its hurt in the moment and its cost to my dreams.  

And I have wondered often what it meant when people said I am enough. Personally I just thought these were people who had published books and were getting invites for glamourous events. Who, after putting years of hard work in building their credibility, were suddenly saying things like, 'I spent years meeting deadlines and I never enjoyed any of it, and now I wish I had, I wish I had known I was enough.' And I thought to myself, 'Of course! Of course you are enough now! You have put in the effort and now the world is courting you. Where as I am not enough, because the world is not courting me. I am looking for opportunities that keep passing me by**. 

And then today, I was listening to this book***  that was talking about flow. I'll just quote

You know the adage "time flies when you're having fun"? That's flow. Self-consciousness and judgement - whether from yourself or other people - are anathema to flow..    

 And I realised that if I am constantly or even repeatedly judging my efforts, then I will not experience the joy of flow. To be able to experience flow, I first have to stop judging my efforts, I have to give myself the benefit of the doubt (and I honestly believe that I have earned that right) that I am doing the best I can, and that my best is enough. That regardless of whether I get what I want, my best is enough if I want to have so much fun that time starts to fly - and that is a life I can happily live with. 

* https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-luck-a-skill_n_4225951

**All the while my gorgeous brother would tell me that people who have known defeat have risen all the more higher for it. People like Andre Agassi who have come back to being champions after addictions.  

***The Power of Fun by Catherine Price, and while I would NOT recommend that you listen to the book, for it definitely takes the joy out of the subject, it does have some interesting research it talks about that you could skim to if you had a physical book.