Do you feel like not enough and too much at the same time?
Maybe you feel like you’re not enough because you tend to strive for perfection and you keep raising the bar. Maybe you feel like you’re not enough because you still haven’t found that best friend. Maybe you feel like you’re not enough because you couldn’t save your mother from her fear and her rage.
At the same time, you feel like too much. Too verbal, too sensitive, too dramatic, too curious, too smart, too emotional, too critical, too perceptive, too idealistic. Too much.
You see? Not enough and too much. At the same time.
How is it that you’re not enough?
• It could be that you put pressure on yourself to perform brilliantly at all times. But you can’t measure up to those standards. So you believe that you’re inadequate. If you were praised excessively for your achievements as a child, your self-worth may now depend on what you can do instead of who you are. On the other hand, you may need the bar to be high because your deepest soul demands it. Either way, it’s tough to sustain.
• It’s often lonely in the rainforest mind. Even though there’s an enormous amount of activity, it can be hard to find people to join you. The speed, intensity and complexity of your thoughts and the content of your conversations can perplex potential friends or partners. It might be very hard to find someone who wants to dive in with you to explore the depths.
• If you were raised in a dysfunctional family ( I know, I know, who wasn’t? ), then your perceptive, sensitive child-self probably took on the job of rescuing your parents and siblings. Perhaps, you recognized that something in the family was seriously wrong. You felt that it was your responsibility to find solutions and provide empathy. When you couldn’t turn things around, you blamed yourself and decided that you were not very capable.
Thus, you feel like you’re not enough.
It might be easier to see why you feel like too much.
• People tell you. Often. You’re told to quiet down, calm down, slow down and dumb down. You talk fast and you think fast. Your brain is on warp drive all the time. Even when you sleep. If you can sleep, that is. Even loving parents can get overwhelmed and not know how to feed your voracious appetite for understanding the theory of everything. Your interpretation of it all, may have meant that you felt like you needed to shrink or even become invisible. There was just too much of you.
But here’s the good news. You’re capable of embracing contradictions. You enjoy paradox. You thrive on the mystery. Not enough? Too much? At the same time? No problem. The rain forest holds it all.
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Note to dear readers: Thank you so much for reading and sharing your thoughts. I hope my blog can be a place where you feel a little less alone and a little more understood. Future blog posts will cover topics mentioned so far in more depth and new topics–perfectionism, sensitivities, loneliness, dysfunctional families, multipotentiality, decision making, schooling, social responsibility, existential depression, creativity, spirituality, resources and more. Thank you!
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