Enough Is Not a Feeling

I was washing dishes when the thought arrived.

I was thinking about the word enough. How I’ve spent most of my life chasing it. Waiting to feel it. Like one day I would do enough, be enough, have enough and the feeling would finally show up and stay.

Spoiler alert…It never did.

And standing there with my hands in the water, I realized something. I had been waiting for a feeling that was never coming. Not because I wasn’t enough. Because enough was never a feeling in the first place.

Feelings are weather. They come and go. You can’t build a life on something that changes with the temperature.

Enough is a decision.

It's the moment you stop waiting for someone else to decide. Stop checking the number of likes. Stop measuring yourself by whether they booked you. Whether the photos turned out. Whether anyone noticed.

I spent 16 years making other people visible. Documenting their lives, their love, their families. Holding up a mirror and showing them what I saw. And the whole time I was waiting for someone to do the same for me. To look at what I’d built and say: yes. That’s enough.

Truth be told, even if someone had shown up to say it, I wouldn't have believed them. That's the thing about enough. Nobody can give it to you. You have to decide it.

I know this because I learned it the hard way. Not from a mountaintop. From a season when I couldn't feel music or food or ideas. When my body was running on empty and I didn't know why.

The camera taught me something about this. It doesn’t care how you feel about yourself on a given day. It just reflects back what’s actually there. The life you’ve actually built. Not the one you’re performing. Not the one you think you should have by now. The real one.

And the real one has always been enough.

The decision isn’t made once. You make it every day. Sometimes every hour. When the comparison hits. When the inquiry doesn’t come. When you look at someone else’s life and feel the gap.

You catch yourself. Mid-comparison. Mid-spiral. Mid-wondering why your life doesn't look like theirs. And you come back. Not because the feeling arrived. Because you decided.

I'm not waiting for permission anymore. Waiting for permission means playing by somebody else's rules. And I never signed up for that game to begin with.