Being enough isn't the fucking point
How some toy cars and a bunch of farts helped me transcend the need to be 'enough' // S1E5
Sometimes, the words flow like wine. Or like any other nice and cool liquid, really. Point is, they flow.
Other times, not so much. Other times the words feel feel like honey that’s been stuck in the bottle for way too long and it takes forever to even open it cuz the cap is so sticky and then another forever for the honey to actually come out and then its WAY too much and you gotta clean up and basically start over.
This essay was one of those times. Except it wasn’t honey. It was more like tar, the most viscous liquid in the game. What began as an exploration of how there might not be such a thing as ‘enough’ became a two-act story about farting. That’s where things started.
Then I turned the whole thing into a screenplay with Ferris Bueller style narration and THEN I wrote an entire first scene of a musical about the land of Knot Enough, a twisted Dr. Seuss-esque magical land full of little creatures named Nots who run around trying to achieve stuff in the hopes of eventually untying the knots in their stomachs. I had Hugh Jackman singing about it!
It’s almost as though I believed that the essay about never being enough was itself not enough. Unless, of course, I added just one more little thing. Then - then! - things would be okay.
What a farce.
I’m starting to think that ‘enough’ doesn’t exist.
Much like God and Santa, “being enough” a false flag operation created by adults to make us behave and strive so that we may one day soon be honored with the gifts of leisure and rest.
I wish it were a lesson I learned once and knew forever, i.e. riding a bicycle. But this feels more like a it’s vs its situation - learn once, then learn again and again and again until its (it’s?) time to leave this earth.
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Being enough isn't the fucking point
I’m lying awake on the couch, restless, waiting. I refuse to wake up in the hour of three like a psycho, so I wait until 4:02am (I also refuse to wake up on the hour like I’m in the army) and get up.
Making coffee and sitting down at the computer I feel inside myself the all too familiar anger that washes over me whenever my feelings are hurt. Why they are hurt I can’t really remember, all that I know now is that everything is bad and so shall it be forever. Grrr.
A cry from my two year old son Wilder’s room explodes into a horror movie shriek.
I run into his room - “my car, I can’t find my car” he wails like a mother who has lost her child.
The wail here is much too much. Like if I was directing this scene in a movie, I’d gently approach him and say, in a hushed tone so he wasn’t embarrassed by the note, ‘hey man you gotta tone it down with the screaming no one actually screams like that.’
But this isn’t a scene this is life and in life, he’s been sleeping with two tiny ass cars from the hit film Cars - McQueen and “Jam,” which is the name he gave the blue car that, upon googling just now, I’ve learned is actually named Strip Weathers, aka The King. But not to mama Wilder.
He often loses one or both because they are tiny and it’s dark and he’s a toddler.
I give the bed a thorough shakedown but can’t find the car.
“Hold on buddy we’re gonna find the car,” I say, 100% seriously.
I give the crib a thorough shakedown but can’t find the - There! It’s Jam, I can tell because of the fender it has atop the frame. Jam is safe.
I pick it up and place it into his hands like I’m delivering a baby from a burning building.
“Ok let’s find the other one,” I say, gaining confidence. I am a hero I am a firefighter I will find this god damn car.
I search and search but I cannot find this god damn car.
Where is this other car? Wilder, where is this other car?
The joker and the thief
We’re about halfway through Season One, my multi-month long exploration into achievement and never feeling like I am enough.
We began with the early years — me prepping for the SAT at a Russian math school in 4th grade. Last episode, I shared Beautiful Disasters, a piece about my recent descent into the mania of doing whatever it took to keep me going so I could create more and do more and be more and yet, no matter the more, it never felt like enough.
In fact, the deeper I go into exploring this ‘never feeling enough’ shit, the worse I feel.
I don’t like it here. I want out.
“There must be some way out of here.”
So said the joker to the thief, complaining of much confusion with, get this, no relief.
So wrote the joker Bob Dylan in his song “All Along the Watchtower,” which the thief Jimi Hendrix then played and made so famous that no one even remembers Dylan anymore. In general - no one knows who Bob Dylan even is now. It’s sad.
That question plays on repeat in my head. The center of the tootsie pop that is my own self worthlessness.
These Days
It’s like every day starts in a state of self-worthlessness, a debt I must repay, a hole out of which I must climb.
But there’s good news! There IS a way out! I can climb out of the hole by building myself a ladder made of praise and accomplishments, achievements and scores. Each rung a ranking of where I stand compared to everyone else. Look, everyone, don’t you see - I am worthy and I’ve got the numbers to prove it.
Except the whole is full of a quicksand made up of all the mean things I think about myself. I am overweight and underloved, I'm reading the wrong books I'm spending too much time on social media I am scrolling too much I am deficient. Inefficient. Forbes has selected 30 under 30 - the rest of us are garbage. Too old now to ever be anything under 30, let alone one of THE 30, which makes me part of the 4 billion under 30 that were not included in any Forbes list.
Will it ever be enough? Will I ever get to rest? Even god rested in the seventh day. I wouldn’t though. I’d make the heavens and earth and the sea and all the fishies too and ya know what? On the seventh day, I’d make froyo. I know it’d get made anyways, but I would want it to be listed alongside the other big stuff - sun, moon stars on the 4th day, water and sky animals on the fifth, land and people on the sixth, and then — as a treat for everyone, my way of saying thanks for being here during all the construction of the first six days, I’d get up on the seven day and work hard to make frozen yogurt. There’d be tons of flavors and even more toppings (it’d take me most of the afternoon to make those yummy mochi balls).
Even with ‘invented froyo’ on my resume, it still wouldn’t be enough though. It won’t ever be, will it?
In which case I ask, again, is there any way out of here?
Why I ended up on the couch that night
I woke up at around 3am with a strong urge to fart, and so, this being America and all, I did. I farted and it was loud, like a sickly trumpet’s dying last breath, Anyway: it was loud and Lauren heard it and went “Oh Alex no” which frankly hurt my feelings.
In her defense, upon reading this essay, Lauren asked if I wanted her perspective on what happened. Sure, I said.
“Your farts are so loud it would be like almost off the charts.”
If true, that would make my farts in the 130 db (jet engine) and 140 db (fireworks from close range) levels. Sounds super credible.
“They are so loud they pull me from asleep. My heart races like I just heard a car crash. Imagine it happening to you — you’re dead asleep and a trumpet blasts in the room.”
To which I responded, “I don’t need to imagine it because it happened to me - I was there.”
"Sleep is hard when you’re pregnant, so when I get woken up like that it’s hard for me to go back to sleep.”
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