Contained
Blooming between enoughness, too-muchness, limitations, and stewardship.
“Maybe our constraints are an altar.
Maybe our limits are sacred. Maybe we fulfill our purpose even if the container is smaller than you expected.”Maybe we aren’t disqualified because we can’t do everything for everyone.
Maybe our capacity, however limited for a season, is an invitation.”
- Sarah Bessey, “In which I get honest about contentment, capacity, and a few other things”
This Enneagram 3 has been wrestling with "But is it enough to the world? Should I be doing more? Am I doing enough?" for many years.
asked these questions in a Substack post last week, and I wrote much of the following as an essay-length comment in response. At her encouragement, I am not being self-deprecating about my hyperverbal tendencies and am instead turning it into an actual essay here. 😊Enoughness and too-muchness haunt me as I bounce between ADHD and anxiety, between disabilities and giftedness, between work-for-your-worthiness hustle culture and the fine line of comfort that tips necessary recovery-mode rest into self-indulgence and privilege. Am I achieving enough to have earned my belonging, my right to be treated with respect, my credibility when I speak on my own story, my rest? And then there are the less me-focused questions: Am I doing enough to steward my gifts for the needs of the world? Am I loving my neighbor or just talking about it online? Am I missing opportunities when I could have made a difference but didn’t see the need right in front of me, which I am uniquely gifted and called to fill?
For one example, there is work to be done around building the field of asexual theology as a subset of queer theology, and I know I could and maybe even "should" do it, but here at this point in time, I spend so much time managing my disorders and disabilities and general adulting that even reading and remembering a book feels like a daunting task, much less trying to be one of few pioneers in a niche and controversial subgenre of a subgenre. Maybe that will change! My containers and limits today might only be for a season. I can’t know.
And still the ambition is there: Maybe I will feel like I am making a difference if I just wrote a book or got a significant speaking gig or finally went to seminary, just as the leaders and mentors in my life have suspected I someday will. The Enneagram 3 in me knows I could be Someone Special, if I just tried harder, had the right master’s degree from the right school, started a podcast, networked with all the right people, had an impressive title, never said “no” ever, flew to all the conferences and namedropped and threw my resume and story around like currency. If tried to be everything shiny and powerful and impressive to everyone all of the time, maybe enoughness would find me.
Alas for the darn bounds of time and space that I have to live linearly, constrained to physics, for lack of a TARDIS.
But being Someone Special is not a magic solution for the enoughness. This is part of my twice-exceptional ADHD, anxiety, perfectionist, compulsive overachiever recovery plan: to live contained to what I can do and not what I should do. I know it sounds simple, like the first-day-of-therapy kind of basic. But I realized in 2024 that I wasn't getting to bed late because of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination, in which one stays up late to extend their fun free time. I simply had too many things on my plate for a normal human to get done in a day, and I am not a "normal" human. I am an invisibly disabled one, just in small ways that add up, and not always obviously, even to myself. My brain and body are different than other people’s, in need of different and sometimes more time-consuming care or problem-solving. (In 2023, my Word of the Year was "Complicated, as in letting myself be." And that was a huge theme. Very accurate for that year. Goodness.)
I know all the hustle culture currency, which we have been taught will buy love or respect, is just another lie of capitalism. So, as Kendra Adachi says, naming what matters to ME (and not to everyone's expectations to live up to) is vital for survival.
Back to the good I could do in the world, which genuinely does need what I am uniquely gifted to share: My skills as an editor and former journalist can teach my friends and followers media literacy; my specific theology and knowledge as a queer asexual Methodist provides a rare perspective on de/reconstruction and advocacy training; my White middle-class privilege to boost a cause or raise awareness or speak until my voice is hoarse allows others to get what they need. But at what point do my gifts/abilities/skills and the world's needs surpass my capacity, regardless of my fit-ness for the task and call to stewardship of all I've been given?
My local leaders of United Women in Faith, the UMC women's organization, said their theme this year, is "No one can do everything, but we can all do something. Let's see what we can do together." It is essentially the same "my drop in the bucket" concept I've held like a lifeline: I can’t fill the whole bucket of the solution, but I can be one droplet that makes the bucket overflow with compassion and care for all.
So I know I can't do everything, but am I doing enough, what's expected of me, what I should be doing, what the world needs from me, what is my duty and responsibility to step up and do? One body, many parts, means I can't be the whole body by myself, but as a body part, am I contributing my function to justify the gifts I've been given and meet the needs of those who need me to give them?
I tried so hard in 2024. I did what I could. And in some ways, it was never going to be enough, and learning that the hard way allowed me to discern "the difference" of the infamous prayer, between what is mine to change and what is mine to accept I cannot change. People like to edit this to "no longer accepting what I cannot change, but changing what I cannot accept" as if it makes any sense. With apologies to Angela Davis, often cited as the source of this quote, it doesn't add up. The lesson of the container is learned in cracking it to pieces and the necessary repair work that follows. I cannot save the whole world and convert them to be Justice Warriors with my leftover Evangelical Hero Complex (vintage Sarah Bessey blog post throwback!). I can't change the election outcome or my body's neediness or hateful people who don't want to do better and refuse to learn anything. But I can accept what is out of my control and still commit to live my values regardless of the circumstances. For another metaphor, if a brick wall is blocking my path, the only way forward is to start by accepting that the wall is immovable, but I am not. I can’t change the wall, but I can change direction in response to it. This is “the wisdom to know the difference.”
As Sarah wrote about, we must make peace with being contained, constrained, being CONtent/conTENT of a boundaried physics-abiding linear timestream with over a third of my 24 hours a day being paid work and another third being necessary sleep. We must trust it's enough, we're doing enough, we're enough, or that we've equipped others enough that they can pick up the baton and start running for themselves. And maybe we build that community we want, not through earning admirers from hustling, impressing, or fulfilling obligations and duties with our own skills, but in encouraging, equipping, opening doors, and giving away our seat at the table to those who need to be heard and seen. And then, when we are refreshed and discerning wisely, we can jump back in with what IS ours to do.
Sarah also wrote of others demanding moremoremore, which can turn from an honor into a storm of expectations and duty and stewardship and performance and responsibility so fast. As Taylor Swift sings, "the crowd was chanting MORE" as she was falling apart and pretending to be on top of the world ("I Can Do It With a Broken Heart"). It is often a mistimed, misplaced, or misworded expression of gratitude.
I say this to all of you from hard-won experience: you are already enough. And you have the wisdom to determine your own course of action and capacity to give. Comparison and competition will not measure accurately, ever. Your worthiness and enoughness lie unshaken within you by any outside force or others’ assessment. You're wanted and not forgotten, you're important and belong, you're respected and trusted, you're so very deeply loved and appreciated, you’re effective and outstanding in your work. And often that work does hit exactly where your neighbors and loved ones have their own needs. And I sit with you all in that grief of discernment, priorities and values alignments, and adding and subtracting to your schedule, knowing that some of the “moremoremore!” cheeping baby birds will have to learn to fly and seek their need-meeting elsewhere because you cannot be everything to everyone all of the time, even if you'd be better at it than others or have been given unique gifts to do it. Sometimes that opens the door for someone else to be the one who steps up to help, and sometimes that learn-to-fly moment will be the realization the baby birds need to lead themselves. The “moremoremore” might be a chance for the crowd to grow into “I can too” and blossom into a community of support so you aren’t the lone pioneer in your area of expertise and giftings, just one necessary and interdependent part of a larger body.
Being involuntarily boundaried by our limitations is a grief. Don’t skip over that part. We must learn to lament.
And also. Healthy containers and constraints can lead to more diverse ecosystems and stronger, lasting growth. They will also help us get quiet and still enough to hear the whisper of the Spirit or nudge in a direction to go and love in ways we are uniquely called to, equipped for, gifted in, and given to delight in.
If I must live bounded in a container of energy, time, space, and ability, then let me be a garden, flourishing and resting and bearing fruit and contributing to the growth of others, each in its season.
