Still Learning to Call It Enough

I am not entirely sure where I am right now.

Not in the way that demands an answer — more like the way you feel when something lifts you gently out of the ordinary and sets you down somewhere quieter, somewhere that doesn’t quite have a name yet.

Logically, I know: I am in a house somewhere near Hualien, surrounded by eight women and the soft percussion of keyboards and birdsong outside the window. I got here in a taxi, chatting with my friend all the way, unaware of the road or the destination, and somehow that feels exactly right. Sometimes the arriving matters far less than the willingness to go.

This morning began imperfectly. I wanted my full ritual — yoga, movement, coffee, stillness — but a sick child and several nights of fractured sleep had other plans. I pulled myself from bed with that particular kind of tired that sits behind the eyes, packed my things, cooked for the group, and climbed into the taxi anyway. And now here I am, fingertips moving, thoughts arriving like something I hadn’t known I was waiting for.

Maybe that is enough in itself.

Maybe that is exactly the point.

But what does enough even mean? And what has it meant to me — to this woman I am still, in many ways, becoming?

Let me tell you about the girl who had no word for it.

For most of my life, enough simply did not exist in my inner vocabulary. There was always more — something new, something else, something just beyond the edge of what I already had. I understand now where that came from, though understanding it took years of patient excavation. My mother had miscarriages. Children who never came into this world. And somewhere in the small, porous heart of a child, I absorbed the weight of that — the haunting what if of the ones who didn’t make it, the quiet, impossible question of why I had been given this life when they were not.

It is a heavy thing to carry, the grief of others, especially when you are too young to name it as grief. What I named it instead was unworthiness. I was here, yes — but being here felt like it needed to be justified, earned, proven enormous. So I tried. I stretched myself toward bigness even as something in me believed I wasn’t quite enough to fill the space I already occupied.

The cruelest part was the duality of it. I was somehow simultaneously too much and not enough — a person whose intensity exceeded what others could hold, and yet never extraordinary enough by my own measuring. I made myself smaller to fit in rooms, and then ached because I had disappeared. I strived for more, and shrank from myself, at the very same time.

How bewildering it is, to be at war with your own existence.

I looked outward for the mirror that would finally show me enough. More money. More achievements. A certain shape of body, a certain angle of face, ears that didn’t stick out quite so much — I remember even that, the specific inventory of ways I fell short. And then the inner list, longer still: not clever enough, not disciplined enough, too quick to quit, too slow to shine.

I chased the idea of enough the way you chase a horizon — moving toward it with everything you have, and watching it move away at exactly the same pace. I finished one degree and began another. I moved abroad. My partner and I built something that looked, from the outside, exactly like the dream: a beautiful house, a career, children, a dog, holidays. We ate in restaurants that required reservations. We drank wine that cost more than it should have. Our children had everything the advertisements told us they needed.

And still.

I remember those early months of new motherhood — pushing a pram through dark winter evenings, the cold settling into my coat, into my chest. The neighbourhood windows glowed warm and gold: someone else’s sofa, someone else’s dinner table, someone else’s life. I watched those lit rectangles with a longing I couldn’t quite name, telling myself that what was inside them was better, fuller, more complete than what I had. I didn’t understand then that I was only ever seeing a reflection of my own fragmented longing. That their windows, too, probably looked golden to someone walking past in the cold.

The truth I couldn’t see yet: I was not failing to find enough. I was failing to be enough to myself.

It would take years to learn that language. Years of therapy — patient, often uncomfortable, sometimes devastatingly illuminating. Years of what I can only describe as gathering myself back: small pieces, scattered like seeds, that when finally met with tenderness began to grow into something I recognized as me. I learned how much of myself I had quietly surrendered in the effort to be acceptable, lovable, impressive, enough. And I learned, slowly, that those surrendered parts didn’t go anywhere. They waited.

Coming back to yourself is not a single moment. It is a practice, unglamorous and ongoing, like any practice worth doing.

I turned 42 recently, and when I look at the shape of my life now, I am almost startled by it.

I own no house. My possessions fit into the bags we carry from country to country. The last stubborn thread of attachment to things — to permanence, to ownership — finally loosened during a long, hard silent retreat last year, and I let it go without the grief I expected. What I have instead is this: a yoga mat that meets me wherever I am. Three healthy children, after years of fear and infertility and odds stacked quietly against us. A cup of coffee made slowly, even if the ceramic mug will never be mine to keep. A love that keeps changing shape and deepening, like something alive. At least one reason, every morning, to feel grateful that there is a new day beginning.

I have very little. I feel extraordinarily rich.

My enough now lives in small, deliberate acts — the kind that would have looked like failure to the younger version of me who believed that enough had to be large to count. A morning practice on the days when my body is willing. The particular aliveness of the spring and summer parts of my cycle, when my hormones carry me like a current and I feel capable of anything. The fact that I sleep now. The fact that my children sleep. The fact that I have finally, gently, released the dream of more children and found, in that releasing, a new spaciousness — new time, new self, new mornings.

Most of the time, my only true home is myself. And that — that — is more than enough.

I cannot always find the words for what this feels like from the inside. The sensation of enoughness is quiet and ordinary, which is precisely what makes it so revolutionary. It doesn’t announce itself. It arrives in the middle of an unremarkable Tuesday, in the smell of coffee, in the sound of your child laughing in another room, in the feeling of your own breath moving through a body you have finally decided to stop fighting.

Some will call me lucky. Some will call me privileged. Perhaps I am a little of both. But I don’t believe this is unreachable. I don’t believe it belongs to a particular geography, a particular income, a particular kind of life. I do believe it requires something, though — a deliberate turning toward yourself. A willingness to ask what your enough looks like, stripped of everyone else’s definitions.

Because here is what I know: enough is not a destination you arrive at. It is a language you learn, slowly, one ordinary moment at a time. And some days you forget every word of it and have to begin again from the very beginning.

I am still learning to call it enough.

But I am learning.

So I leave you with this, wherever you are reading from, whatever season you find yourself in:

What would it feel like to stop, just for a moment, and consider that what you already have — who you already are — might be exactly, quietly, enough?