You know, as far as some people are concerned you will never get it right.
You’ll never be good enough.
Never be smart enough.
Never be attractive enough.
You’ll never measure up to the invisible yard stick that all of us keep in ourselves and measure the world by.
Well, good.
Maybe we shouldn’t measure up.
Maybe the more we work to measure up the further from who we are meant to be we get.
One of the worst things you can do is chase the ghost of someone who doesn’t know who they are themselves. You don’t need to be someone else, you need to be you, and if the people around you don’t dig that then you clearly need to get around different people. Change the circle, not yourself.
Do you really wanna waste your time with someone who doesn’t think you’re good enough?
And I get that there’s something in us, something broken in all of us, where we’ll meet people, romantically, or in our work life, or as a friend who we will want the approval of desperately. We see them as almost shining, as a golden image of what we wish we were and we’ll do whatever we can to make ourselves look, sound, and feel better and good enough for them. But we’ll never be good enough. Not for everyone. And that’s fine. It’s fine because some relationships, whatever their bend, are not meant to be. Some friends we are not meant to have, some lovers we are not meant to be with, and some jobs we just don’t want. Why on earth do we want to put ourselves in a position where we are always proving ourselves? Where we feel like we always have to walk on thin ice in order to keep someone or something in our lives.
That IS no life.
We should strive to improve ourselves, not prove ourselves.
We should invest more time in the people and things that want to see us better ourselves FOR ourselves not so they can have us as part of their clique or ‘team’.
The thing we don’t see in one another, the thing we are so often blinded by is the damage we all have.
The cracks in one another’s surface.
The measuring stick we never live up to in ourselves.
That person you were never good enough for is the same one that has created a false life for themselves on social media. A life that’s all laughter, and friends, and concerts, and parties, and that never shows the late night loneliness or the bottom of the bottle blues. The boss you so desperately want to impress has people above them that may not see THEIR worth, and you never see that they too may be walking on ice and waking to the sound of cracking ice in the night.
We want so badly to be wrong about ourselves, to see ourselves through carnival mirrors that distort who we are because we never feel like we’re good enough. The thing is, the only person we need to be good enough for is ourselves and we already are.
We fight every day.
We struggle every day.
We push ourselves, pull ourselves, drag ourselves through everything and move forward.
Even when we don’t want to.
We screw up.
We hurt people.
We do damage to ourselves and those around us but we still fight. We fight to be better, stronger, and to grow and learn from our own selfishness and idiocy.
Make no mistake, we will always be the lead villains in our passion play but we can overcome ourselves. It’s a fight that we will always struggle with and often lose but as long as we don’t stop fighting we won’t always lose.
Life isn’t a race.
It isn’t a puzzle.
Life is a path and sometimes we get lost. It’s our job to find our way back and to find our way forward.
Ever forward.
And some people, some jobs, some things are just not meant to be.
It doesn’t make them bad or wrong. It just makes them bad and wrong for us.
Our purposes don’t mesh so we fight to forge ourselves into what we think is needed and that can never last. It can never work. In the end we’ll just fight ourselves and hate the false life we’ve built. You can fake it for a while but there’s a time when the only fool in the room is you. People don’t want the fake you because that makes them feel like they can’t be genuine either. Sure, people lead lives you wish you lead, have jobs you wish you had, but we want those things without seeing the pain, the loneliness, the doubt, or the crappy co-workers. We don’t see that others wish they had our lives because that’s what we do, wish for the lives of people who are not us and wish for them without even fully seeing that entire life, good, bad, and heartbreaking. We look at other things the way we look at ourselves, through twisted glass that distorts the good and bad and makes us want things that are ill suited to us. We love to run down dead end paths because we think they lead to better places, not realizing that the path we are on can lead us right where we need to be if we will stay with it and will be brave enough to forge new paths when needed.
We’ll never be good enough for the rest of the world because we’ll never be good enough for ourselves.
So don’t try to be good enough.
Try to be you.
That’s all that matters.
And what you find is that by just being you you will meet amazing people, have mind blowing adventures, and will find things that challenge you and help you grow. There are enough people, enough opportunities in the world that the last thing we need to do is to focus on one person, or one thing and set our lives up to be a winner takes all where if we don’t ‘get’ it we’re a failure. Life’s too long, life’s too fun, and life’s too miserable all on its own without us setting ourselves up for failure because even if we do get that job, or connect with that person we’ll always be wearing an ill-fitting mask that will never let anyone see our true selves. A day will come when we forget our own face and should we lose those things that meant so much to us we won’t even have ourselves to comfort us.
Better to stand alone in a field and let your own radiance draw people and opportunities than to chase after black holes that will only suck you dry. It isn’t always a fun path, but it’s our path, and as soon as we’re willing to take ownership of it then the sooner we’ll be able to truly move forward and move on.
…c…
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 