Not Good, Not Smart, Not Strong, Not Enough
You’re Not Enough… Yet
The more the marbles wastes, the more the statue grows.
You’re Not Enough… Yet
My darlings, sit beside me. Bring your jagged little doubts. Bring your tired phrases. Those quiet knives you've been carrying beneath your breath.
I’ve heard them before. Whispered in your room when you thought no one could hear. Written in the margins of your silence. Felt in the weight of your shoulders when you came through the door.
You say:
I’m not good enough.
Not smart enough.
Not attractive enough.
You list them like gospel truths, as if someone, somewhere, chiseled them in stone before you ever took your first breath. But I need you to know something. Every one of those sentences is missing its final word. You’re not good enough… yet.
Do you hear it now? That pause? That space at the end that still holds a door open? You’re not smart enough yet. Your mind is still stretching, still unfolding like a map you haven’t finished reading, still learning how to move through the world without mistaking every sharp edge for your fault, without cutting yourself on every misunderstanding, every silence, every glance you don’t know how to interpret.
You’re not attractive enough yet. Beauty is not a flash in the mirror. It is not symmetry or stillness. It is a long, slow fire and you are still becoming flame. Beauty does not arrive all at once, tied in ribbons, filtered and fixed. It is born in moments of risk. In the crack in your voice when you speak your truth aloud, in the tear you don’t hide, in the way your laughter breaks pattern, unexpected, like a bird singing at a funeral.
Real beauty unsettles. It makes people look twice. It carries awe, yes, but also terror. Because it reminds us we are temporary, we are raw, we are unscripted.
Perfection is a marble statue in that it’s smooth, cold, and finished. Admired, maybe. But never touched with love. Never held with trembling hands.
Beauty lives where flaw is allowed. Where something doesn't quite line up. Where a scar interrupts the skin and tells a story deeper than that scar can burrow. Consider Michelangelo’s Pieta(s). In which, with study and a harshly critical eye, one can make out pyrite inclusions and anatomical mis-proportions.
At least that’s what I’m told. But those tell a deeper story and it is not possible to take one seriously that would not call them beautiful.
Beautiful and imperfect.
So when you say you’re not beautiful, I wonder what standard you’ve been crucified upon. Because you, in your becoming, in your uncertainty, in the way your soul still stumbles through light, are beautiful in the only way beauty has ever mattered: You are real.
Not attractive enough yet? My child, you are fire not finished burning. Not talented enough? Not experienced? Not confident enough?
Love, none of that is fixed in stone. You're not standing in front of a sealed gate, you're walking a path still being drawn beneath your feet. The world will try to rush you. Tell you to arrive fully-formed, like a sculpture without cracks, without questions.
But the truth is, even the saints grew tired. Even the prophets stumbled through years of not enough, before they found their voices. So when you say: I’m not strong enough, I ask: who told you that being strong meant never shaking? Strength lives in the trembling, too.
When you say: I’m not lovable enough, I want you to look into my eyes and see how deeply loved you’ve been from the first breath you took. Before you had words. Before you could offer the world anything but your presence.
You say: I’m not worthy enough for them. Not outgoing enough. Not fun enough. Not popular. Not accepted.
And I say: You do not have to shrink to fit inside someone else’s comfort. You are not a song written for background noise. You are thunder. And not everyone was made to dance in the storm.
There are days you’ll feel like a closed door. There are nights when all the lights go out and every version of not enough gathers around your bed like ghosts. You’ll say: I don’t have enough money, or time, or energy, or support, or luck.
And I’ll remind you how many people build whole lives from scraps and aching. And every drop of sweat can be a seed.
You say: I’m not enough. I’m not whole. I’m too broken. I missed my chance. There’s something wrong with me.
These are the deepest cuts. The ones you learned without anyone ever needing to speak them aloud. And they are lies, rooted not in truth but in fear.
You are not a mistake. You are not behind. You are not less.
You are becoming.
And becoming is slow, and sacred, and sometimes it feels like falling apart. But it is not the end. All the voices in your head that try to close the sentence with silence and shame, don’t let them win. Because there is still room for the last word.
And that word is yet.
You’re not finished. You’re not done growing. You’re not at the end of your story. You are not enough… yet. And one day, you will say that for yourself. And you’ll believe it. And it will be the most honest thing you’ve ever spoken.
Until then,
I’ll say it for you.
Every day you forget.
Yet.
Flowery words are wonderful, but sometimes we need something a bit more straightforward. That word… yet… it’s small, but it holds everything. It means your story is still being written. That you’re still becoming who you’re meant to be. It means there is time, and space, and hope. It means the door is still open.
You’re learning. You’re growing. You’re stumbling, yes. But you’re stumbling forward. Your mind is expanding. Your voice is taking shape. Your spirit is waking up to its own fire.
You think beauty is what you see in a mirror, in filtered pictures, in polished perfection. But real beauty isn’t clean or quiet or finished. Real beauty is alive. It shakes things. It makes people feel. It’s in the parts of you that tremble, that crack open, that don’t fit neatly into anyone’s mold. You are beautiful because of those parts.
You may feel like you’re behind. Like everyone else has it figured out. But everyone, even the strongest, even the saints and the heroes, have walked through the dark valley of “not enough.” And they didn’t come out perfect. They came out real.
You are not broken. You are not a failure. You are not unworthy of love or success or joy. You are just unfinished. And there’s no shame in that. It’s the most human thing there is.
I know I’m repeating myself with redundancies in repetition, but that’s what Dads do. Without repetition how would we remember anything?
Just don’t forget and I won’t have to talk to you about this again.
Though I’m always happy to do so. You just say the word.
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One should know that the sculptor knows every flaw in the statue, even the ones that the harshest critic cannot even perceive. Perfection is in the beholder.
Beautiful!