Never Enough

You shouldn’t do this. With my eyes flitting between the three, small, white index cards clutched in my pale hand and the dull padding of my dress shoes as they step in and out of the brown and beige tile squares that comprise my high school’s tile floor, I resist the urge to return to the bathroom. You’re going to look like an imbecile. They are going to hate you. Back and forth I walk, not aware of my own pacing, as I attempt to concentrate on the story I had just read. What are they going to think of your idea? Is it too much? Too stupid? You're too stupid.

The moment is surreal. I can feel my feet weighed down by gravity as I take yet another step along my ten-foot path, yet I’m also floating. What if you forget important details? My mind is flitting up, out of my physical body, and with each step, I attempt to pin it down and remember the problem at hand. What if, what if, what if…No, I can do this…no you can’t. You’re a fake. No good. You just haven’t been discovered yet. I can’t seem to consolidate my thoughts or focus on any details. But I have done well, doesn’t that count for something? All I have is a story, an ant, a grasshopper, a crazy idea, and so many intruding thoughts I can’t construe the story in my brain. That was just luck. You’re just a fumbling idiot who doesn’t know what you’re doing… Well, that was the current dilemma: I don’t know what I’m doing—because I can’t fucking concentrate. I look at the time—eight minutes until I walk into that room to crash and burn. I rush to the bathroom.

It’s my senior year. My fifth year competing on my school’s speech team. I’ve already been to State Speech three times. The almost crippling fear and self-doubt that gripped and crushed my racing heart when I was thirteen and stepping into a judging room for the first time remains. This is one of the first speech-meets of the season and this is my best, but most dreaded category: Storytelling. But the details aren’t important. The setting isn’t important. It’s the feelings. The thoughts. The intrusive, self-hating, deprecating, doubting, worrying, cruel, self-conscious, drowning thoughts and feelings that pervade what feels like every moment and memory. I can’t go to bed, have a conversation, walk across my work office for a glass of water, or spend time with a friend without the burden, the weighing down of the inner voice inside me that instills self-doubt and repeatedly tells me, Never enough.

Anxiety. It’s cruel.

It wasn’t the public speaking that made me wear out a path on the tile floor or rush to the bathroom, sick to my stomach. I had spoken in front of crowds my entire life. I relished the attention and authority of standing in front of a large congregation of people at the ripe old age of nine and reading scripture at the pulpit on Sunday morning. My hands still shook, but I liked being put on a pedestal—both literally and figuratively in this case. This is likely due to my need for approval. What I feared, or shall I say, still fear beyond anything else? Being judged. Ridiculed. Criticized. Deemed unworthy, unintelligent, ugly, fat, irritating, incompetent, unlovable. And the phrase that takes the prize? That seems to repeat itself in my lowest, most vulnerable moments? That whispers and rattles in my brain as I heave panicked sobs, attempting to catch my breath, trying to grasp some semblance of reality as my thoughts careen out of control in the dark, deserted depths of my bedroom at 2 am in the midst of a panic attack? Never enough.

I remember with distinct clarity the first time I said this to myself. It was fourteen months ago. It was the first week of December and the usual heat of the Arizona desert had shifted to an arid, nipping cold. My tires had barely rolled onto the street and outside the edge of my best friend’s apartment parking lot when the tears began streaming down my face. Blurring my vision and my future.

Driving down Euclid Avenue, this was the phrase that seemed like a depressing, heart-ripping out of my chest epiphany. Never enough. I remember wishing that I could stop caring. It would be the cure to all my problems. At least that’s how it felt at the time. How was it that you could care so deeply about a person, constantly go out of your way to improve and enrich their lives, give so much, and they give so little back?

We had made the mistake of turning our friendship into something more, but the fact was, he wasn’t right for me. Too immature—so wrapped up in his own head, own needs, own desires, that I shouldn’t have expected any more. But, I did. I expected him to care…like I did. Go out of his way…like I did. Make sacrifices for my happiness…like I did. But he wasn’t me. And I was never enough. I felt isolated. So lonely despite the people around me. Why couldn’t he tell how I was feeling. I was calling out, crying for help. And what chance did I have of being heard in my loneliness? None. Because I didn’t want to say it. I wanted him to see. To understand. He didn’t know how I was feeling. Didn’t know that for a week straight I left his apartment balancing on an edge of self-hatred, ready to tip over at any moment as hyperventilating tears blurred my vision.

My thoughts can best be described as malignant, growing like cancer in every direction of my mind, pervading the depths of my soul, draining my spirit. It was stage IV, the pain so high, the tumor so large and pervasive I was ready for physician-assisted suicide. Myself the physician.

The reaction was dramatic. Too dramatic for the situation. I didn’t love him. But that wasn’t the problem. He wasn’t the problem. The problem was I didn’t love myself. The fight that was raging was not between him and me, flesh and flesh, his words against my choking heart, but between me and my anxiety. The guns and swords and knives were dancing, sparring, slashing within the confines of my own mind. Anxiety doesn’t just stab you in the heart to end the match. It circles you, waiting for a moment of weakness, an opening to wield its sword in your most vulnerable places. You block, you push back, you come hilt to hilt with every pernicious emotion trying to survive. And at this moment, with my jaw clenching, my breaths shallow, and the panic setting in, I was losing.

Never enough.

When I speak with someone, even a best friend like he was, my anxiety speaks in my ear. It says, they don’t really like you. They just hang out with you out of pity. They would much rather spend time with someone else. You are a burden. Get out of their hair. Apologize. Apologize for being in the way. Apologize for taking up space!

Anxiety. It’s lonely.

It does something to a person and to a relationship. It creates this tumor and if the physician doesn’t dissect it, recognize it for what it is, and consciously remove it, it will take over the entire system. It will kill you. And who you are to others. And that—that was the problem. The physician—I—didn’t see the tumor for the malignant bitch it was.

During my sophomore year of high school, I attended my second year of Spanish. I was a straight-A student: diligent, astute, hard-working, and responsible. I put in the work, but also intuitively grasped the material. Yet, I was intensely fearful that I would fail a test. It was not rooted in fact or history. I had prepared. I had studied, practiced, read. I knew the material. Yet that day, like every other, I frantically went through notes afraid something would arise on the test that I didn’t know. I was kneeling on the chair of my school desk. I had charts, vocab lists, and notes on grammar spread before me. My heart was racing, my blood vibrating beneath my skin. The clock was ticking, figuratively, as the clock on the wall behind me was big, red, and digital—yet I felt the dissolution of time with each nonexistent tick as if it rang in my ear. The panic seeped in. I dreaded Spanish tests more than anything. It was a friend’s words that confronted the emotions and thoughts I had ignored. Looking back, I don’t know how I didn’t realize then.

“Why are you always stressing so much? You know you know the material. You know you’ll get an A. Stop being so anxious. You’re always so frantic.” Anxious? I wasn’t anxious. Was I? No, that was something my mom, my sister, my grandma dealt with. I wasn’t like them.

“What do you mean? I’m not anxious. But what if I don’t know something that’s on the test?” I’m not sure what’s more revealing. Her statement or my response. My life, my choices, my thoughts, my every action revealed my anxiety.

However, I was no stranger to other’s anxiety. I was probably fifteen when my mother realized how deeply I understood. She asked me, “How did you know?” My mother’s voice wasn’t soft. Not wondering. But maybe a realization, a laugh, a pique of interest at the tip of her tongue as she looked at me with a type of unconditional love that is so pervasive in my family. I knew what she was speaking of, but I didn’t know how to put my understanding into words. “I just do. I know you.” And I did. I knew her better than I had realized. My mother’s anxieties—innumerable as they are—were part of my mother. It shaped her interactions (or lack thereof), her choices, her tone, every facet of who she was. And I knew it without realizing it. I didn’t need to put it into words. All I needed to do was help her in every way I could.

This particular night it meant getting redressed no matter how desperately I wanted to go to my bedroom to watch a show and go to sleep, choosing her needs over my desires. It meant going out, playing a game called Bunco with a bunch of middle-aged and elderly women, and acting as a support for her social anxiety. She didn’t really need to ask me.

I did not want to go; I really did not want to go. It had been a long, stressful, exhausting day. Even so, she didn’t have to ask. I would go, just like I always did.

After all, she really couldn’t remember everyone’s name, a catastrophe in a pastor’s wife’s world. I didn’t know their names either, but standing their together was a comfort she desperately needed. She really did have very little to talk about, being alone most of the day—no job, no hobbies, no life. I was the mediator between her anxiety and the rest of the world.

It wasn’t something I ever remember talking about. But I knew my mother preferred if either my dad or I was with her at social gatherings. So, I stood from the tall black stool in front of our kitchen island and wrapped my arms around my mother.

She wasn’t the only one. I had stood by friends’ sides as they confided in me their own anxiety. The way it felt. How they thought. I was no stranger to how anxiety affected the people around me.

So how didn’t I recognize this? Or rather, why didn’t I allow myself to come to grips with this aspect of who I am? Why did I deny? Was it because I viewed this as a weakness? Was I scared to have inherited these troubling aspects of my mother? Was it because of the clearly negative and judgmental views of mental illness that both my father and sister, and even my brother who has anxiety himself, hold?

It wasn’t until sometime in April or May that I began to recognize the tumor inside my brain for what it was. After endless nights of tear-stained pillows and body wracking panic attacks, I began to reflect on why I was never enough. I am thoughtful, kind, intelligent, comical, and attentive. What about me made me not enough. The answer was clear: nothing. My faults were no worse than anyone else. These thoughts that tore me down, eviscerated my insides, left me nauseous and miserable were not truths, but lies left unrestrained.

It was also around this time that I realized I could be the physician. That I could dissect this malignant tumor in my brain. I could suppress and understand the effect it was having on my body, my mind. That if I was careful, my anxiety wouldn’t leave me begging the physician to assist me, to rid me of all my pain once and for all. I could restrain the lies. It was both an epiphany and a slow drawn out realization that brought me to understand myself and how this raging fight inside my brain can be fended off. I’m still learning. But my anxiety is not the only one with a sword. And mine is stronger and sharper. And every day I get better at wielding, blocking the hits, and landing my own.

Sometimes it corners me, and I’m lost in the recesses of my mind. I feel broken, deserted, unloved. Just like the what if, what if, what if that pervaded my mind as I prepared to give my speech, I doubt and questions that I’m enough. The voices of my anxiety will invade. I will carry this burden always. But one thing holds true from now unto forever, the tumor is never enough to let the physician assist me.

Anxiety. I can live with it.