Enough: A Feminist Reflection

How many of us, as we quit our bed and place our feet on the earth to go about our good and necessary work, drink deep from some authentic feeling, beneath language, some cellular knowing, that we are, this moment, more than sufficient-that we are the light of the world? What if, as an experiment, if only for a day, we lived as if we believed that there lived in us some reliable strength, wisdom, and wholeness?  What if we were to pretend that, regardless our health or mood, our fortunes or circumstance, we would remain quietly wise, accurate, and trustworthy in our judgments and actions? How would we respond differently to the world during such a day? –Wayne Muller “A Life of Being, Having and Doing Enough”

This business of sufficiency is in my (not so humble) opinion hardest for women. Therefore I’d like to offer this reflection as a woman to women. My hope is that men can gain insight and support for their own spiritual journey here, but my primary target audience is any/every woman who has ever rendered herself insufficient. I offer these words with fierce love for who you’ve been, who you are and who you are becoming– always enough.

My friend Kim and I were sitting at lunch one day during graduate school and she referenced an author she’d heard speak publicly the week before who said: “the entire economy would collapse if women loved themselves.” When Kim recalled this statement out loud at lunch, something reverberated in my bones. Something deep inside of me registered the truth of this claim in a physical and spiritual way. As a female bodied person myself, I knew well the pressures (and failures) of trying to swim in a market that relies on women feeling like they’re not enough. If we were enough why would we need all these products and processes to enhance our beauty, bodies, mothering, wifery, home-making, sex lives, etc? If we were enough why would we be bombarded every time we open our computers or drive down the street or watch television with internet, billboard and commercial images that tell us to lose weight with Jenny or Weight Watchers or the local gym, to get our vaginas tightened or our breasts maximized at the local plastic surgery clinic, to get our teeth whitened with the latest bleach-saturated dental gel, to get our hair straight or curly or extended or blonde or brown or red or pink? As a female bodied person myself, I knew my friend’s utterance to be true because the systems around me and my individual responses to conform to and break free from those systems confirmed every word.

When I feel insufficient as a woman because I am listening to the fairy-tale scripts about what it means to be a “good girl” or feeling insufficient as a woman because I can’t get ‘pretty’ enough to satisfy the internalized patriarchal gaze that would have me be a perpetual sex object or feeling insufficient as a woman because I have too many opinions and ideas in a world that renders me less intelligent and less worthy of having my voice–when I’m in these places of personal insufficiency I seem to need stuff to make me feel better. I reach for quick fixes sometimes, reach for the things that will dress me up or hide me better. I reach for things like clothes and make up and pedicures. Sometimes I eat less or eat more, because withholding or over-indulging have everything to do with sufficiency. When I cannot render myself enough, I tend to need stuff. Material stuff. Quick. Easy. Sometimes cheap and sometimes expensive. And when I reach for those things, which 100% of the time fail to satisfy if I’m using them from a place of low self-esteem, I reinforce the market conditions for production that fundamentally rely on and profit from woman-hatred.

When i feel comfortable in my own skin, when I am able to see myself as a unique incarnation of God’s body that is whole and wholesome, one beautiful woman among all the other beautiful humans, when I am able to see myself in a balanced way, as a woman capable of great love and great harm, when I am able to surface my own vulnerability and strength and see both as necessary components for a life well lived, when I get in touch with all the sweet and serious and sad moments of this “one wild and precious life”–when I’m in these places of personal sufficiency I don’t need a thing. Don’t need to buy anything or reach very far. In fact, when I can feel my own sufficiency, I’m much more likely to feel the sufficiency of those around me, particularly the sufficiency of my earthly sisters who are so often stripped of their dignity. That completely changes the breadth and depth of what I rely on. Feeling our own sufficiency doesn’t mean we wont’ rely on things outside of us; it just means that our reliance will come from a place of strength and wisdom instead of low self-esteem attempting to quick-fix. Feeling my own sufficiency enables me to reach out for people, particularly other women. And that doesn’t cost a thing. It also disrupts the market forces that fundamentally rely on and profit from woman hatred.

You know why the life of enough is so scary? Particularly for us women? Because if we were living it practically everything around us would collapse. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. Particularly if what emerged from the rubble resembled what God intended for all of us all along: a people who recognized their own divine likeness and treated themselves and one another accordingly.