Confessions of a self saboteur

I'm my own worst enemy. I don't need someone to tell me I missed something, I know I did and I beat myself up over it for days on end. Missed a question on a test - five day bender of crying, excessive obsession over reviewing, and restructuring of future study guides (yes I made my own and yes they were awesome). I can go on and give more examples, but you catch my drift. I'm terribly hard on myself. I have been since I was young and as I've gotten older I have only gotten worse. I drive my sister insane with how hard I am on myself as I come home from work beating myself up for not handling something right or letting something get out of control or not getting every last bit of the work completed. Most days I think I set myself up for failure because I set the bar so incredibly high knowing I won't reach that height for one reason or another. My life devolved into a mess of coming home and feeling like a failure who couldn't complete the simplest of tasks.

This week I got to attend a training class on leadership and this woman talked about being enough. She said that after being in her career for so many years she had learned she was finally enough. Enough for herself, for her work, for every aspect of her life she was enough. Now I will say she is a little older, but I envy her statement. I envy her ability to feel confident enough to stand up and say that she is enough for any aspect of her life. I'm no where near being able to say I'm enough, mainly because somewhere down deep I'm thinking I'm not as much as so and so how has good hair or so and so who has this and so and so who is this. I fall into that little trap so dang much each and every day. Really the lengths I put myself through are quite astounding really. I'm my own worst enemy.

I think sometimes though women are trained to be our own worst enemies. We see the pictures on glossy magazines waving in our faces at the checkout lines. Taunting us with images of people we will never be because in all actuality those women don't exist either. They are images of fiction, nipped and tucked courtesy of photoshop and airbrushing. They are caricatures of their real selves on display for the world to see. These are the images we are held up against and throughout our lives we are trained to think unless we are like them we are less than something. I think I drank the kool-aid. Too much of those images and thoughts and ideas wore through my thick skull and left their impression. And I don't just mean in the physical aspect of myself, but in all aspects. I constantly knock myself down and hold myself to some unreasonable standard of excellence that honestly no one could really attain. The trick then becomes bringing what I want to be in alignment to what and who I actually am today. The effort becomes being able to say I am enough, I'm good enough, pretty enough, strong enough, smart enough, and worth enough to keep going forward with my plans and dreams and goals.