I Spent Years Trying to Be Enough | I’m Done Now

For a remarkably large portion of my life, I behaved as though someone was keeping score.

I am not entirely sure who.

There was no clipboard. No official panel. No stern woman in a sensible blazer sitting behind a folding table, quietly deducting points because I forgot to send a birthday card or served frozen pizza for dinner.

And yet, somewhere along the way, I became convinced that womanhood was an audition.

Be likable.

Be helpful.

Be pretty, but don’t try too hard.

Be successful, but not intimidating.

Have opinions, but don’t be difficult.

Be a good wife. A good mother. A good friend. A good daughter. A good employee. A good neighbor. Remember everyone’s birthdays. Bring something when you’re invited. Volunteer. Smile. Don’t complain too much. Keep the house relatively presentable in case someone stops by, which is particularly ridiculous because no one stops by anymore.

And whatever you do, try very hard not to disappoint anybody.

I got pretty good at it.

Maybe you did too.

The Part I Thought I Was Supposed to Play

For years, I thought there was a version of me I was supposed to become.

She was organized and gracious. Confident, but never obnoxious. Interesting, but not weird. Stylish without looking like she had spent too much time thinking about clothes. She exercised regularly, drank enough water, remembered to thaw the chicken, maintained meaningful friendships, kept her kitchen counter spotless, and never once stood in the grocery store trying to remember why she had gone there.

I have never met this woman.

Frankly, I find her exhausting.

Still, I chased her.

A lot of us were taught to.

Women of my generation came of age during a particularly confusing stretch of cultural messaging. We were told we could have it all, which somehow became a suggestion that we should do it all—and look reasonably pleasant while doing it.

So we learned to read the room.

We learned how to make other people comfortable.

We softened sentences with just and maybe, and I could be wrong, but…

We apologized when someone bumped into us.

We said yes when we wanted to say no and then quietly resented the thing we had agreed to do.

We worried about being selfish.

We worried about being difficult.

We worried about being too loud, too emotional, too ambitious, too sensitive, too much.

And on the flip side, we worried about not being enough.

Quite the little system, wasn’t it?

There was almost no way to win.

Then Midlife Did Something Wonderful

I don’t remember the exact moment I stopped caring quite so much.

There was no dramatic declaration.

No montage.

No walking away from an explosion in slow motion while wearing excellent sunglasses.

It happened quietly.

A small loosening.

I started noticing how tired I was of explaining myself.

How often I edited my reactions before anyone else could see them.

How many decisions passed through an invisible filter:

Will they think this is strange?

Will she be upset?

Does this make me look ridiculous?

Am I too old for this?

What will people think?

And somewhere around midlife, another question started to appear.

Do I actually care?

Well.

That changed things.

Because sometimes the answer was yes. Of course it was.

I care what the people I love think. I care whether I am kind. I care whether my choices hurt someone. I care about being dependable and decent and the sort of person who shows up when it matters.

But caring about people is not the same thing as living for their approval.

That distinction took me an embarrassingly long time to learn.

There Was Never a Panel of Judges

This may be one of the strangest revelations of adulthood:

Most people are not thinking about you nearly as much as you imagine they are.

They are busy thinking about themselves.

They are wondering whether their stomach looks weird in those pants.

Whether their text sounded stupid.

Whether they talked too much at dinner.

Whether everyone noticed the thing they said in the meeting.

Meanwhile, you have built an entire imaginary tribunal to evaluate your haircut.

It is almost funny.

Almost.

Because when you’ve spent decades seeking approval, you begin handing other people authority they never asked for.

You let a raised eyebrow change your plans.

A lukewarm response makes you reconsider something you loved five minutes ago.

Someone else’s certainty convinces you to distrust your own knowing.

And perhaps the hardest part is realizing how often you volunteered for this arrangement.

Nobody appointed them judge.

You handed them the scorecard.

I Would Like Mine Back

Here is what I know now.

I am allowed to like what I like and change my mind when something no longer fits.

There is nothing wrong with becoming deeply interested in something that makes absolutely no sense to anyone else. I can wear the thing, write the thing, try the thing, quit the thing, begin again.

Sometimes I will stay home. Sometimes I will go out. I can speak up, say no, say yes, want more, want less, and rearrange my life when the old arrangement stops feeling like mine.

And yes, I am allowed to disappoint people sometimes.

That one is difficult.

Especially if you have spent your life being dependable.

But disappointing someone does not automatically mean you have done something wrong. Sometimes it simply means another person’s preference and your choice did not match.

They can wish you had chosen differently.

I can still choose differently.

Both things can be true.

That realization feels almost revolutionary when you’ve spent forty-some years believing everyone else must be comfortable with your decisions before you are allowed to make them.

This Is Not My Villain Era

Before anyone gets nervous, I am not suggesting that midlife is the perfect time to become an inconsiderate menace.

I am not planning to start knocking over grocery displays or telling strangers exactly what I think of their parking.

There is a difference between becoming yourself and becoming unbearable.

I still want to be kind and generous. Manners matter to me. So do promises, showing up, and the way we treat people.

What I no longer believe is that goodness requires self-erasure.

Kind women can have boundaries.

Loving women can say no.

Generous women can protect their time.

Good women can make choices other people don’t understand.

And a woman can care deeply about others without asking permission to exist exactly as she is.

That is the part I’m learning.

Maybe that is the part I will always be learning.

Still Becoming

I used to think becoming was something young people did.

At eighteen, you’re becoming, at twenty-five, you’re figuring it out, and at thirty, you’re building a life.

And then, presumably, at some mysterious age, you arrive.

Finished.

Fully formed.

Congratulations. Here is your casserole dish.

But I don’t think we arrive.

I think we keep meeting ourselves.

Sometimes for the first time.

There are pieces of me I couldn’t have known at twenty-five because I hadn’t lived enough yet.

There are things I understand now only because life has disappointed me, delighted me, humbled me, surprised me, broken my heart, made me laugh at completely inappropriate moments, and given me enough distance to recognize what matters.

I don’t want to return to the woman I used to be.

I love her.

I’m grateful to her.

She got me here.

But I don’t owe her my future.

There are still rooms in myself I haven’t entered.

Opinions I haven’t formed.

Things I haven’t tried.

Stories I haven’t written.

People I haven’t met.

Versions of my life I can’t even imagine yet.

And I find that incredibly comforting.

Because I am not finished.

I am not late.

And I am certainly not standing in the wings anymore, waiting for someone to call my name.

I Am No Longer Auditioning

So this is where I am now.

I am trying to choose curiosity over approval.

Truth over likability.

A life that feels like mine over a life that looks convincing from the outside.

I will still get it wrong.

I will still overthink the text message.

I will still occasionally walk away from a conversation and replay it seventeen times while washing my hair.

Old habits do not pack their bags simply because you’ve had an epiphany.

But I notice them now.

And when that familiar voice asks, What will they think?

I am getting better at asking something else.

What do I think?

Maybe that is one of the gifts of the good middle: realizing there was never actually a panel of judges in the first place.

Not having all the answers.

Not becoming fearless.

Not finally reaching some perfected version of ourselves.

Just realizing there was never a panel of judges in the first place.

The stage is mine.

The life is mine.

There is nothing left to prove.

And for the first time in a very long time, I am not waiting to find out whether I got the part.

I already belong here.