I’m not good enough. I’m not good enough. I’m not good enough.

It used to echo in my mind all the time, this aggressive rhythm on a loop. Still does, when I’m walking around town or in my room alone staring at the ceiling, letting my mind drift. Less these days though, which is kind of ironic since this is the year our collective mental health nosedived. But spending most of the year sitting at my computer for eight hours at a time, I realized my own insignificance. I’m so microscopic, who cares if I’m good enough? Who gets to define something so arbitrary and why am I letting this amorphous shadowy standard-bearer decide my worth?

Usually, I feel nostalgic and older at this time of the year. I read over homework or even old texts, look through photos from the beginning of the year, smile sagely to myself. (Wow, that girl was so young and immature.) This May, not so much. The last few months felt excruciatingly slow-motion. I didn’t learn a whole lot, at least not academically. Let’s face it, none of us did. We learned really creative ways to cheat and we memorized every line on our bedroom ceilings. Why pay attention to Zooms when you could be napping? The fruits of the last year of turmoil are more abstract than concrete, for me and most of us, I think. 

We learned empathy and introspection together. How universalizing that was. I began to become unstuck in that woe-is-me, no-one-understands-me teenage mentality because we all suffered together, we declined and we triumphed in tandem. I am very small but we are very big. Instead of feeling a quiet shame that I need drugs to keep my brain from turning on itself, I joked with new friends and old friends about what medicine we were on: Zoloft or Lexapro? Even a friend of mine who can never say how he really feels asked me how I was doing on my dad’s birthday. I wasn’t so embarrassed about loving old books anymore. Lots of people are weird.

They want us to think that our worth is in what we produce, so we can score well on tests and make our school look better, so we can be efficient cogs in the machine. That’s not true. I am just as valuable on the days I spend lying in bed crying as I am on the days when I win writing contests. I am valuable simply because I exist.

I finally learned that this year.