"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

[omnia_mutantur]

a man whose nickname i can't settle on posed the question what's enough? and it's been banging around inside my head like a june bug on a screen. ka-thud, ka-thud, pausepausepause, ka-thud. it's hard to talk about, because i still don't know how to untangle the threads of just-me from the skein of my relationship anymore, i'm not even sure if it's still possible, and there's the added layer of knowing that i may judge possibility not by some absolute, but by my own desire.

enough is when it only hurts in ways you can handle. enough is when you've managed to drown out most of the voices you carry around inside your head telling you you're not enough, be it smart enough, fast enough, strong enough, rich enough, safe enough, thin enough, good enough. enough is when you can find yourself comfortable in your life more often then not, and you don't pick at the underpinnings to the point of structural damage. enough is being able to let some things go, being able to pick which sleeping dogs to wake and which to avoid.

which sounds ludicrously depressing, or like i'm preaching about settling, and that's pretty much missing the point, so obviously i'm not saying it quite right. but it's more about, for me, recognizing my internal mechanism of tearing myself down as relatively meaningless in the long run. and wow am i full of qualifiers today. enough isn't, and maybe never was, a matter of acquiring more, but instead of learning how to view what i have acquired.

i know that what i have now is enough, is more than enough in a way that makes the question of enough irrelevant. but i've got a relationship that takes up my whole world, i've cast aside all my dreams of being old and crazy and alone and having my seventytwo near-feral cats (one for every year of age) eat my face when i trip in the kitchen and crack my skull open one fine winter day, for better, if less visually disgusting and less certain dreams. if i didn't have that, i'm not sure how my definitions would change. but it's not about my job, and it's not about my schooling, and it might be about my slow accumulation of a ludicrous number of books, the people i talk to in meaningful ways, or the emotional wellbeing of my cats as far as i can determine it, but really, it's all about my relationship, and i'm okay with that in a way that i never, ever, ever in a gazillion years could have imagined myself saying calmly, much less living calmly. or maybe it's about the space my relationship gave me to investigate parts of myself. or maybe it was happening all along, and the timing just dovetailed with the burgeoning relationship, and there's no way to separate the two, like the water in Joy's ceremony.

enough is the place where i stopped trying to chew my own limbs off, because the metaphor wasn't that interesting anymore, i wasn't that bored, that hungry, that curious, or that interested in hurting myself anymore. enough is a combination of arriving at enough, and deciding that where you've arrived is enough. and now i've used the word too, too many times for it to make any sense. but enough is a good place, i think.
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