Enough

On the easy easy trap of humanity's worst self-sabotage

I have been away living life, practising how to feel full.

Like the moment I stood in my long-distance boyfriend’s kitchen in Denmark watching the golden Scandinavian light touch the apple trees and the long meadow grass, the air full of bird song. It was the only place I had wanted to be for weeks, it was my heart’s desire, and right there and then I felt as I began to pour sadness into myself, just as if I’d had a jug and my mouth open. “If only I could be here all the time. It’s not fair,” I thought. God, I could have pulled gallons of sadness and loss and hard-done-by out of the air, you know what I mean? I could have kept swallowing it down, had I not caught myself. Welcome to the single most reliable way to ruin something perfectly lovely, perfectly filling. Welcome to humanity’s greatest self-sabotage. I thought about that as we lay side by side in the hammock, my love using his fingertips to gently rock us from side to side in the sunshine. I put aside thoughts of going home and all the days we spend apart and let the moment fill my belly. Enough.

There was the day, too, that we drove across the mainland to the west coast, our favourite stretch of sand and water to celebrate our anniversary. F had booked a night in a lodge in the middle of nowhere so I could rest with views of the sea. The lodge was sweet and cosy, the dry, grassy dunes towering high all around us. And as we battled with my wheelchair along the sandy paths hoping for our self-promised view across the evening’s ocean, my wheels sinking and sticking hopelessly before we could get anywhere near, I felt it start to rise again. If only I could walk properly, look here how I was holding us both back, how I had spoilt it, but I caught it like a biting fly in my fist. No. Instead, we laughed as we battled and laughed as we gave up, the sand nipping at our skin in the cold North Sea wind. Back at the lodge two swallows sat still and plump over our doorway, red and roosting for the night, and we whispered our goodnights and went to bed and honestly, honestly, wasn’t that just plenty enough too?

It became a new kind of game, in the end, catching myself at it. I felt it every time my symptoms rose and clammered and cut me down. I felt it every time I shifted, uncomfortable or pained. I felt it every time I thought about the book edits I’d just handed in, my mind racing, scheming, “maybe this book won’t make me successful, won’t make them love me or make me belong, accepted or ascended, but maybe the next one will.” I felt it every time I took note of the day of the week and counted the days left together, every time I thought of ‘home’ and all the things I must do now to hold everything together, and each time I said NO and turned back to where I was, what was happening, and each time I broke the spell I found I had a feast of a day - a feast of a life - laid out right before me. 

I was sick when I got back and it was easy then in the stillness to see how close I had come to squandering the whole damn thing. How close I always am to spoiling the table, poisoning everything, and all for what? Why do we do it? When it’s all rushing past us so inevitably? When any moment might be the last we get? We all know by now that the “I’ll feel happy when…” lie is a trap. We all know that however much healthier or successful I manage to become, I could always keep moving the goalposts.

I’ve set up an app on my phone that chimes a soft chime every 15 to 30 minutes. Perhaps it will drive me bonkers in a fortnight, but for now, every time it sounds I am stopping to pause, hand on heart, to feel how good life already is, how sustaining, how enough.

Look, I am determined to break this habit of a lifetime. I am determined to die feeling full.

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