Enough

“Wow, that’s a really big salad,” my mom says, eyeing the bowl in front of me with what I perceive to be a note of judgement, maybe even disdain. “Wow, that was a really short walk,” she says, as I stroll into the carport, sweat on my brow from the mile I just walked with fifty pounds of weight in my rucksack.

Lord knows I’ve internalized that I can never do enough. That I myself am not enough, otherwise I would surely be leaner, stronger, richer, smarter. Sometimes I catch myself at the end of a long, objectively productive day, where I’ve eaten well, worked out, written and published, been social, etc, and I still feel like I’ve done nothing, that the day was a failure. “Wow, that’s really all you did today?”

It’s little wonder I have such a complicated relationship with the most common advice about behavioral change, which points to starting small, being consistent, but giving yourself grace. “Progress, not perfection” people routinely share in 12-step meetings, “was the key to my recovery, to getting my life back, to quieting those awful voices in my head.” Just build your atomic habits, bro. Or maybe it’s micro habits, or tiny habits, or sub-atomic particle habits.

But no, that approach surely won’t work for me. In my mind, a salad that’s too big is a source of shame, even if it’s replacing something much unhealthier. A 15-minute ruck around the neighborhood isn’t enough, nor is a few minutes of heavy kettlebell swings. 200 words of writing? Nah, no point. Just going to get judged, shamed, disapproved of anyway.

In November of 2024, the day of my heart attack scare, I tell my mom that I need space from her. We hardly talk for the next two months, as I work my food recovery program imperfectly, but diligently. Hitting meetings and talking to my sponsor every day. Making ever so slightly better choices, and being honest about the days when I slip up. By early January, I step on the scale and I’m blown away by the number I see. It feels inconceivable to me, given how imperfect and unheroic my efforts have been in the previous months. It annoys me, but James Clear seems to be right.

When I think about commitment, my mind immediately jumps to performing some kind of Herculean effort, and doing it flawlessly. That’s what it means to commit. To do more, do it better, to be so fiercely disciplined in your striving that the world simply cannot help but bend to your will. One of the core messages in 12-step recovery is that self-will and self-destruction go hand in hand. The more you try to force life to be what you want it to be, the deeper the hole you dig for yourself, and the more your compulsions grow. The only path out, much to the ego’s displeasure, is surrender to something much larger than yourself, and far more loving than those nasty voices in your head.

Day by day, as I climb out from my latest bout of depression, I have to stay aware of that voice, my mom’s, that shouts I’m not doing nearly enough, and that my modest efforts won’t add up to anything. I know, deep in my bones, that listening to that voice is the surest and quickest path back into the depths of burnout and despair. Back to the place where I haven’t even energy for the simple, small things that make a body and a life function. Commitment, I’m beginning to learn, is less about heroic effort, and more about taking life one day at a time, and giving attention to the small, imperfect, unsexy activities that allow me to stay in the game, show up tomorrow, and keep the conversation moving forward.