I Thought If I Just Did Enough

It was 11:40 at night and I was refreshing a number.

I’m not going to tell you which one because it doesn’t actually matter, and also it changes depending on the week. Sometimes it’s a sales number. Sometimes it’s how a post did. And then sometimes it’s just the running tally in my head of everything I said I’d get done and didn’t.

That night it was a dashboard, and I kept pulling it down to refresh like the number was going to become a different number if I looked at it enough times.

It didn’t. (They never do.)

And here’s the part I’m a little embarrassed to admit. Even on the nights the number is good, even when it’s the number I said I wanted, there’s this half second of relief and then my brain immediately goes okay but what about tomorrow. Like the goal post just quietly picks itself up and walks ten feet further down the field while I’m still standing there thinking I scored.

I have done this my whole life.

The grinding. The producing. Working harder like output is the thing that makes me matter. And from the outside it looks great.

It looks like discipline. It looks like a woman who has it together.

People have literally told me they don’t know how I do it all (I don’t), and I take the compliment, and then I go home and add four more things to the list.

Because if I’m honest, underneath all of it, the doing was never really about the work. It was about trying to feel like enough.

Like if I just produced enough, showed up enough, stayed impressive enough, eventually I’d cross some invisible line and finally get to exhale.

I never cross it. There is no line. That’s the whole trick of it. The bar just resets.

I think the reason this one is so sneaky is that it doesn’t look like a problem. Nobody pulls you aside to stage an intervention about how hard you work.

The world rewards it. It hands you praise and money and a reputation for being reliable, and all of those things feel good, so you keep going, and the entire time you’re just feeding the same quiet belief in a more socially acceptable outfit. That my worth is something I earn. That it’s conditional. That it can get taken back the second I stop.

And the thing I keep running into, the thing I genuinely cannot out-work, is that I can’t fix a belief problem with effort.

I just can’t. But do I sure do try!

More doing has never once changed what I believe about myself at the root. It just gives me somewhere to put the anxiety for a few hours.

What’s actually true, the thing I have to keep dragging myself back to, is that I’m a daughter of God.

Which sounds like pie in the sky when I say it out loud. Because actually believing that, walking in it day in and day out, is such a process, and not one that comes naturally to me. I have to be reminded, continually, and then I have to put the identity on. I don’t naturally feel it.

I wish I could tell you I live there now. I don’t.

I know it the way you know a fact, in my head, where it’s safe and tidy and doesn’t cost me anything. Living from it is a different thing entirely, and it asks for a kind of inner work that genuinely undoes me, because when I stop performing for a second I have to come face to face with what I actually believe about myself with nothing covering it.

And that is so much scarier than just staying busy.

So mostly I’m still here. Still catching myself at 11:40 with a dashboard. Still feeling the goal post move. Still learning, slowly and not very gracefully, to put the phone down and trust that I was already enough before I opened it.

I’m not on the other side of this one. I want to be really clear about that. I’m writing it from inside it, same as you might be reading it from inside yours.

So, anyways. If you’re refreshing your own version of the number tonight, I’m not going to tell you to stop.

I’m just going to tell you I’m doing it too, and that I don’t think the number was ever the thing that was going to fix it.