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You Need to Know: You’re Doing Just Fine.

Yesterday I said something careless to my ten-year old son, Noah.

He’d been playing outside with his six year-old sister and she’d gotten hurt. In my knee-jerk response to her sobbing I made him feel responsible for her injury, accusing him of somehow not taking good enough care of her. It was a lazy, reckless statement but probably less rare than I’d like to admit.

I saw the hurt in his eyes the second it came out of my mouth and I realized I’d failed him.  

I didn’t just feel bad for what I’d said to Noah, but particularly because of the conversation we’d had only the day before. He’d dropped something in the house, and a few minutes later I’d found him in his room, his eyes blurred with tears.

“I just feel like a failure all the time.” he said. ” “I feel like a terrible son and a bad brother. The kids in the neighborhood make fun of me for being too sensitive. I don’t do well in school…”

My heart ached for my son because I love him dearly—and because I understood exactly how he felt.

I’ve lived for a few decades like this and I recognized the pattern well. I could see him doing exactly what I’ve learned to do with great skill: how in moments of frustration and disappointment I so deftly play prosecuting attorney, listing off all my many failures and flaws and mistakes, until I have an airtight, iron-clad case against myself and I feel hopeless.

I think we’re all a lot like Noah.

I think most of us spend our entire lives, and no matter how much we accomplish or how well we do, no matter how much we learn or overcome as adults–we still feel like scared, frustrated little kids who can’t get it right.

Maybe it’s the cruel, critical words someone said to us when we were younger, that we’ve never gotten freed from.
Maybe it was the sting of comparison that came early, when our grades or appearance or achievements never seemed to match up to the other kids.
Maybe it happens when we inventory our adult lives and wonder just where we veered from the wide open promise of our youth.
Maybe it’s that we see our weaknesses so clearly that can’t see our own goodness anymore.

I imagine you might need what Noah needed yesterday.

You need someone to stop you, turn your shoulders gently, look you right in the eyes and with great love tell you:

You’re doing just fine. You really are.

This life is difficult, friends. None of us are qualified for it. We’re all doing exactly the same thing: trying to make it through a day we’ve never been to and course correcting in real-time when things go wrong. We’re all flailing around, trying to grasp excellence and competence, usually settling for mediocrity and skinned knees.

I always tell my son to do his best and trust that is enough. He has trouble with this. It’s a difficult lesson for most of us to learn.

Often I’ll look back at the end of a day and realize how many opportunities I missed, how much I forgot or screwed up or got wrong. “You didn’t do your best today!” I’ll tell myself with great malice.

What I’m learning though, is that it was my best. It was the best I could do given the day and the conditions and the state of my soul. If I became impatient or cut-corners or got frustrated; that impatient, corner-cutting, frustrated version of me was the best I was capable of being—and that’s OK.

I don’t know if you understand what it’s like to feel like Noah felt; to be perpetually disappointed with yourself or convinced that everyone else surely is.

I don’t know if you live with the continual soundtrack of critical voices telling you you’re not doing enough or making enough or being enough.

I don’t know if you too, inventory your day and begin to mount the case against yourself until you are all but certain that you are a failure.

You’re not.

You need to know that today.

Do your best and rest in that.

Your best is enough.

Breathe and keep going.

You’re doing just fine.

 

 

 

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