New Year Ruminations on the word “Enough”

enough: as much as is required

synonyms: sufficient, plenty

This is my monthly apology for my posts now being monthly when they were originally intended to be weekly. As I’ve explained to you all before, depression keeps me from doing a lot of the stuff I like to do (except, by some miracle, teaching!) and writing is one of those things. But I have gotten my groove back and I intend to keep it around for a while (yay)

I’ve had this post topic planned for a while, with the intention of making it my first post of 2017. Those of you with mood disorders or other tendencies that just keep us from functioning on our standard setting, however, know this feeling well:

I have spent a lot of time thinking and reflecting and beginning the process of mending a lot of things since the start of 2017. But there’s a word that’s been circulating a lot of the conversations I’ve had around healing; the word enough. It has manifested itself in a few ways, some empowering and some really triggering.

TW: Alcohol mention, food mentions.

If you celebrated this New Year sober, I hope your night was filled with love and peace.

The first encounter I had with enough this year was probably enough to drink on New Years Eve (my best New Years’ Eve in forever!) at a bar with my best friend. After a year long relationship that was virtually dry in the alcoholic sense, I needed a little space to have fun that way.

Alcohol has had a history of playing weird games with my depression and anxiety, and engaging my ED in the dysmorphia that often runs my mind when I’m deep in binge thinking. I am fortunate enough to have a ‘shut off valve’ with alcohol, so I was able to have fun but not “too much”, and I was able to say enough.

I know this is not the case for all of us. Some people in eating disorder recovery don’t drink for a multitude of reasons; the dysmorphia that ensues after, the triggering idea of consuming calories that aren’t food but are still just as burdensome, and so much more that I’m sure I don’t need to bring to mind. Some people have co-morbidity that doesn’t allow them to say “when” to drinking.

My most mentally prevalent encounter with enough was at a family dinner at home a few days into the new year. My mom made meatloaf, my favorite home-cooked meal. For whatever reason, life got ahead of me and I hadn’t had a chance to eat lunch that day, so breakfast was the last thing I had consumed before then. Hungry!

I reached for another slice of meat. I was not yet full.

“Caitlin, you’ve had enough,” my mother scolded.

The room froze and it felt like a gut punch. I was still hungry, having not eaten all day. Enough? I thought. Enough?! The verbal justifications began spilling from my mouth.

“I’m hungry, I didn’t eat lunch, the last thing I had was breakfast at 11 am this morning.” I left the table feeling annoyed, not satiated, humiliated, angry, resentful, embarrassed, upset.

I am almost 23 years old. I should not have to justify still being hungry, not feeling full, what is going on inside of my body, or the food I put into my mouth.

Letting it roll off of me wasn’t easy to do.

My most recent run-in with enough was during an amazing session with transformational coach Brandilyn Tebo, who I first heard about from her interview with Jessica Raymond on the Recovery Warrior Show. She gave away 20 free calls to begin the year and I got one of them. We set it up for last Wednesday.

Brandilyn specializes in helping people see past their self-limiting beliefs and reach their fullest version of themselves. I knew a little of this before I called her, but my reaching out to her came from a place of needing desperate help getting through the behaviors that have led to my experiences from the past few months–codependency, a bad breakup, and the resentment that comes from it. All of which have coincided with, manifested into, and exacerbated my eating disorder in a number of ways.

What I told her was that I had heard of her through RW, but I didn’t realize how much of what I needed help with actually related to my eating disorder until I started writing this post.

After explaining my breakup, my recovery, and the situations leading up to needing her help, she gave me an analogy for the resentments I’ve been feeling: that in my adult life, all the things or people who have hurt me haven’t created anything new; they have simply touched the wounds that have not fully healed. Like petting a cat who has never been in a fight; if its skin isn’t broken, it won’t flinch. But I have been in a fight, a few of them, and I’ve still got the scars to prove it–and the people I’ve spent age 18-22 recruiting to help me chase my brokenness have put their hands on those scars and kept them from closing. 

She asked me, “What made you decide, whenever you did prior to this, that you weren’t enough? What variation of “I’m not good enough” did you tell yourself was true?”

We spoke about the belief system that seven year old me built for herself; the anger that she manifested at the situation of perceived abandonment that she felt no control over, and how that became an eating disorder, self harm, and perpetually having to carry others’ emotional luggage as collateral.

Unpacking this has helped me see just how much my younger self didn’t understand. It wasn’t that I hadn’t done enough living at that point, it wasn’t that I wasn’t enough at all…but it had everything to do with that I made up my mind that I wasn’t important, that I wasn’t enough, and that my anger at whoever I could blame for my feeling abandoned would protect me.

My variation of “not enough” has come into my life translating itself as “I don’t have control over this situation, therefore my wants or needs must be unimportant.” I embraced resignation as a coping mechanism, often in the form of bingeing. I allowed myself to become the Atlas of other peoples’ choices, burdens and mistakes.

This narrative was disempowering to me, but for nearly 15 years I have used it as the momentum and the blueprint for forming relationships with the people who helped me prove a misinformed theory about who I am and what I am worth. 

In 2017, I say no more. I have had enough.

I am grateful for the opportunity and privilege of being able to apply this new perspective to so many areas of my life, and stop trying to build a case against my own value. My seven year old brain didn’t know better, but 22 year old me is ready to move out of her safe, angry place and find her enoughness in this world.

The moral of this long-awaited story: don’t let anyone define YOUR enough, and let this be the year you challenge every belief that has held you back since you could remember feeling damaged.

(I never write acrostic poems, but I had to for this occasion!)

Each of us can

Nurture and love

Ourselves on our own,

Understand our limits, express

Gratitude and define our own

Happiness and strength!