"am I good enough?" I read that in some review of M. Obama's recent book 'Becoming', that that question underlies every phase of her life narrated in her autobio. to me it gives an immediate sense of humility, maybe even of insecurity of losing one's achievements, also of strife and struggle that makes every achievement more precious and viewed with more distrust, almost un-believingly.
yet it is possible to have that question gnawing inside you all the time while lacking humility, while being afraid that you overestimate yourself. maybe because 'good enough' does not have an external scale, but is measured against an internal one, that keeps adjusting, moving, fading, colliding with one's perceptions of others.
how do class, birth, and social privileges manifest themselves in one's self-opinion? and how does a big exogenous shock to one of those settings in which one finds oneself, shake those indelible markers of opinion? how do relationships change it, if they are honest enough to present truths about us, fairly or harshly worded?
last evening I suddenly got tear-ily nostalgic about my early twenties. about the people I found then in life, many of who have stayed, but don't feel the same as then now. all the tests I have put myself to since then, have altered the sense of entropy I had then. it was probably the last time in my life when I felt confident and bursting with potential, although acutely aware of my weaknesses but at the same time endowed with a sense of being able to fix them. and yet after falling a million times I feel happier in my withering than I could have ever imagined it then. I have evolved wings, and fins, and filters too. and have learned how to do the penguin walk for fear of slipping and falling on my face.
some people I now keep bumping into take me back but not in a good way. what is it really? do they remind me of myself screaming with my friends while we stood frozen between zooming cars in Dhobi Talao (those friends I no longer call friends), or me yelling 'asshole' affectionately at the guy for who I had a mixture of disdain and fascination because he seemed something I knew I would never become, or me in those years when I started to become myself how at first I had to find my tongue again and therefore often blurted things I shouldn't have in civil company and started to give in to lost temper with those around me. No I have considered all of these. I think what they remind me of is the self-centeredness one realizes in early adolescence after the awkwardness of the teens melts away and one feels for the first time like one is in control and that one understands deeper meanings in life and loves. this comes to stay, but without an honest critical lover or friend, or life that knocks one down time and again, it becomes a little obnoxious.
"her eyes stared vacantly at mine every time I told her a tale, but sparkled when she cut in to our conversation with a completely off-track statement that centered attention back at her. she couldn't stop talking, or voicing aloud that she was drunk. "
