How did we learn to trust everyone but ourselves?
A reminder that you are enough.
Can I trust myself? Am I enough?
Have you ever asked yourself those questions? Have you ever been told that you are not enough? That you cannot and should not trust yourself?
Well, you’re in good company.
In fact, I’d say wherever you go, whatever space you set foot in, be it physical or digital, you’d be in good company.
The question of being enough saturates our self-help books and essays and Instagram accounts and… you get the idea.
The question of trusting ourselves is raised in literally every moment of every day. At this moment, as I write these words, I hear the niggling voice, questioning whether I am ‘enough’ to write this. Whether I am experienced enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, enough enough enough enough. When I click publish on this article, I am making yet another conscious choice to trust myself.
Every day we are faced with these questions…
Can I trust myself?
Am I really enough?
I am curious about their origin, their innateness — whether these questions are always with us, or whether we have learned them. I don’t know for sure, but I am curious about whether early humans questioned whether they could trust themselves, as they ran from the lion about to feast on them for dinner.
You might have noticed how our society, our world, manipulates us into asking these questions; into doubting ourselves.
If you’ve asked these questions… well, me too. My experience with these questions, this prominent self-doubt, is heavily based on my religious experience.
I was heavily involved in the Christian world for most of ten years — my adolescence and early young adult life was caught up in the hype of ‘loving Jesus’ and ‘serving the church.’ While Australia generally sees less extremist religious behaviour in its mainstream Christianity than much of what I have read about in the United States, it is still present here, and increasingly so.
One of the fundamental messages of the Christian’s life is this: trust God. This is taught alongside another fundamental ‘truth’, one that I am still unlearning — that we must distrust the body, distrust the self; the body and the self are inherently sinful, inherently worthy of distrust.
This distrust is dangerous. It teaches us to trust a God and even allows for us to trust the church leaders before we trust ourselves. Why is that so bad? Because we are taught to look away from ourselves, to find our answers externally; to seek the answers for the questions of our precious and wonderful lives in other people, in other beings. In leaders, in their mediation and guidance, and in God — who usually appears to us in our leaders voices. But most importantly, we are to look anywhere other than in our selves. Because we are not enough.
I saw an Instagram post by an Australian pastor, directed to teenage girls, saying that “we need to stop telling our young girls… you are enough”.
Wait, what? You wanna tell me you have regular conversations with your teenage daughter that she is not enough? Okay Mums, if you can manage that, kudos to you. I’ll pray for your daughters.
If we believe we are not enough, we will seek to fill that ‘not-enoughness.’ Humans are all about community, and being accepted, remember? And if we seek something ‘out there’ to fill this ‘not-enoughness’, it opens the floodgates to those who want to manipulate or control us.
We live product to product, throwing our trust to the wind.
We may not have all experienced this in a religious setting, although I suspect many of us have been exposed in some way or another to the above.
If not, follow me here; we exist together in a society based on consumption. Our society throws marketing our way every day — we are overwhelmed with advertisements telling us what we need. Crying out to us, about how we can finally be enough. They scream for us to not trust ourselves, but ‘trust us,’ trust this brand: you need this product. This product will fill you up. It will let you finally be enough. So we live product to product, throwing our trust to the wind, allowing other people, other organisations tell us what we need to make our lives complete. Never stopping to listen to the quiet voice, our inner wisdom, desperate for us to pause and listen.
It feels like we have been living in the middle of a society who prefers us sleeping.
Here’s the thing, though.
Nobody else has lived the exact combination of events and feelings and moments that you have.
Nobody else has lived your life.
You are a wonderful accumulation of your life experiences. Who you are today has arrived where you are, because of the series of events and feelings and moments that have been your life. And you will keep arriving.
Your trauma, heartbreak, wonder, elation, anger; your high school experiences, your work experiences, the moments where you are alone with your thoughts; your desires; your passions. All of them and more have come together to make up the magic that is you. And you, you are worthy of love. You are deserving of your trust. You are enough.
Nobody else is home in your body.
Nobody else has experienced the exact combination of events and feelings and moments that you have. Nobody else is the same product of nature and nurture as you are.
And this means that there is not a single person who can take your choices, take your feelings, and tell you that they know them better than you do.
Not a single person who can tell you that you are not qualified to make your own decisions. Not a single person who can tell you that you need any qualifying criteria to ‘be good’ or ‘be enough’.
Of course, I am not writing off good friends, good advice, healthy relationships, or spiritual guidance. These can be good things.
I am, however, writing off the relationships that think they have a right to your decisions. I’m writing off the advice that claims to know a truth for you, that you know inherently within you is wrong.
I’m writing off anyone who will advise you against sitting with yourself and letting the wisdom that your years of experience have threaded together within you guide you.
You are enough and worthy of love.
You know, we have an intuition, heck, a brain, for a reason. And it’s not so that we can spend our lives distrusting ourselves. It’s not so that we can spend another second believing we are not enough. It’s not so that we can defer our decisions and our self to any and every other person in our world.
I spent ten years of my life believing this was the best way to live; deferring decisions to people who hadn’t even considered my life experience, letting institutions and workplaces tell me how to live, tell me I am not enough, tell me I should not trust my self.
Let me tell you — it is not fucking worth it.
In my reclamation of trusting myself, I left that church world I told you about at the start. And I’m not here to tell you to leave it too. I am here telling you to wake up — whatever space you’re in.
This is the first and hardest part, waking up.
Realising that looking outward is not the answer. Realising that we are the answer to the questions we have been seeking.
We must learn to trust ourselves.
We must learn to reclaim this truth, that we are enough.
We must.
Strong words, but true ones.
