I Spent My Whole Life Feeling Like I wasn’t Enough…
I spent my whole life feeling like I wasn’t enough…
As a student, I got straight A’s, but the only thing I desired was to be liked by the popular kids.
As a gymnast, I won gold medals, but all I wanted was another girl’s body.
When I got into Yale, I wondered why I couldn’t raise my hand, and fell silent in class.
When I started working at a hedge fund, I wondered why I felt inferior to the 19-year-old fraternity boy intern.
When I started fundraising, I wondered again, why the sloppy guy with no track record eclipsed my confidence.
When my advisor manipulated then kidnapped me into his home two hours outside of the city, I blamed myself for being stupid and too trusting.
I spent my whole life feeling like I wasn’t enough…
But there was always something deep down that knew I could do so much more.
There was something that knew that if I could grasp the ever-elusive confidence I saw the boys and men around me embody, I could be unstoppable.
This is what drove me - the vision of who I could be, despite who my mind told me I was.
So I kept pushing.
I kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing.
Pushing myself to do things so far outside of my comfort zone, sharing things so deeply personal and vulnerable because I knew,
If I couldn’t face my truth - no matter how ugly - I would be trapped forever.
People always told me I had “so much potential” but you know what happens to kids with “potential”? They do one of two things:
They accumulate approval, grow massive egos, and waste their potential
They feel extreme anxiety to live up to the expected potential everyone else sees in them
My biggest fear was not living up to my potential.
My projected potential buried me in self-doubt. It didn’t matter how much I achieved, how many medals I won, how many compliments I received. I was convinced that I was not good enough, not prepared enough, not experienced enough, not smart enough, not extroverted enough.
So I kept pushing.
I kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing.
But at a certain point, instead of pushing outward, I started pushing inward.
I pushed myself to look into the most painful moments in my past. The ones I had been hiding from all my life…
The first time I experienced the embarrassment of racism when that classmate made fun of my Asian eyes on the playground
The first time I experienced the pain of rejection when that boy decided he wanted to be with another girl
The first time I experienced shame of my body when I stuck a finger down my throat to copy the older girl’s eating disorder
The first time I experienced the loss of identity when I missed qualifying to my Olympic dream by 0.25 tenths of a point
The first time I experienced the fear of loss when an ex-partner threatened to take me down.
I always said that I never knew what it felt like to be angry… Even as I immersed myself in the pain of these past experiences, I felt sad, I felt confused, I felt stressed. But I did not know how to feel angry.
… And then there was the first time I experienced the ugly hand of sexism at work. And the ensuing confusion and anger of being undervalued, overlooked, and assumed as an inferior
By my boss who worked me like a slave, because he could
By the investor who blackmailed me, because I wouldn’t sleep with him
And most of all, by the man whose mediocrity was laughable… and yet still managed to dictate my self-worth, wear down my self-respect, and diminish my value as a human being.
And for the first time I experienced RAGE.
I experienced a rage so deep, a rage so potent that it turned into my blood and it flowed through every inch of my body. I needed to let it out somewhere, so I started talking to other women, and it hit me that these were not my stories alone. These were the stories of EVERY. SINGLE. WOMAN. Past, Present, and Future.
And it finally dawned on me that these were the stories that would set me free.
These were the stories that would set everyone free.