Enough When

Post Author: Kendra Joyner Miller

It is cold as my feet touch the bare wooden floor, and a shiver creeps up my spine. The protective cocoon of the bed where my love still lies, peaceful, calls. But no. I’ve started a new program, a new regimen, a practice that will help me find centering, peace, intentionality, and God in my life if only I wake in the wee hours of the morning when the house is still quiet. Before the onslaught of the day begins, before a little voice calls like a rooster welcoming the day, smiling from the bars of her crib and demanding the typical fruity breakfast of “Nanna!”, I sleepily find my journal, a cup of coffee, and my chair.  I’m just so damn tired. I cannot help but wonder if all this is really worth it. It has to be, right? Why else would I have left the peace that I held nestled in only moments before other than for some epic search for greater peace.

The self-help industry and the social media equivalencies are all trying to sell us this belief that you can be -fill in the blank with your desired outcome – healthier (i.e. thinner), wiser, happier if only you follow their ten step program. Like a siren’s call, we respond by drawing closer to their rocky shores, buying fitness bikes, waking up early, going to bed late, doing hot yoga, taking dips in frigidly cold oceans, drinking gallons of water (and therefore using the bathroom more than any person should in a pandemic back when toilet paper was scarce). We are told that life would be better if only we appreciated the little things more, lived in the moment more, had clearer boundaries, and set better intentions. 

While these things are not inherently untrue and might even feed us for a season, my ship has often been battered upon the rocks, and I’m left floundering in an ocean of shame.  All I can hear in my head is the song: “be more”- “different”- “a better you.”  All I can wonder is, “What’s wrong with me?”  I fall asleep in my chair, candle lit, journal open in my lap. I cannot seem to carve out the time for this way of being. There is no grace in this place. There is no understanding and compassion. No arms holding me, assuring me, “It is hard to parent in a pandemic.” “It is hard to pastor.” “Hell, it is hard just being human.”  I’m left searching for what bootstraps I can pull up. 

What we forget is that the self-help industry is a $10.5 billion industry that rides on our inability to find contentment and enoughness. It is estimated to grow to $14 billion by 2025 (LaRosa) and with it our growing discontent, feelings of inadequacy, and scarcity.  “We are being sold on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves, all at once, and the parts we did not previously know needed upgrading,” writes Alexandra Schwartz in her article, “Improving Ourselves to Death.”

As people of faith and religious leaders we are naturally predisposed and susceptible to the siren’s call of self-help. The religious after all are often called seekers and pilgrims. We are all looking for something, and the search isn’t wholly bad. The search gives us agency, and it can help us find tools that really do help us to feel, well, better. But when the industry of self-help makes a profit on feelings of inadequacy, then we have entered into the dangerous, dare I say sinful, territory of capitalism and white supremacy. It’s a place riddled with the cancer of always more that inherently benefits those already in positions of privilege and power. It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Maybe we hold ourselves and these goals, hopes, and intentions lightly. We rightly size them, making space for us to be human: to sleep in, dance till midnight, and eat in ways that give joy. Maybe the answer is that I don’t have to be fooled by my puritanical roots that tell me I will be “good enough when” and I am instead invited to hear God’s call: “You are loved, now in this moment.”  Sometimes this love will inspire me to wake up, write, and pray. And sometimes that love will rub my back, head nestled into the great Comforter, and there I will find rest.   

Works Cited

LaRosa, John. “$10.4 Billion Self-Improvement Market Pivots to Virtual Delivery During the Pandemic.” Market Research, 2 August 2021, https://blog.marketresearch.com/10.4-billion-self-improvement-market-pivots-to-virtual-delivery-during-the-pandemic. Accessed 8 November 2021.

Schwartz, Alexandra. “Improving Ourselves to Death.” The New Yorker, 8 January 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/improving-ourselves-to-death.

Accessed 8 November 2021.