I am capable.

Voices can ring loud in the mind, unchecked for years on end: Too slow. Too awkward. Too dumb. 

Not good enough. 

Those refrains have dripped into me like a mental Chinese water torture. I encountered them first in a weak moment, powerful and overwhelming amid that earliest brush with depression, and they’ve trickled into my consciousness in the years since. Even in the best and healthiest seasons, they’ve never fully disappeared. 

It didn’t matter that I got my first full summer job at seventeen and have been asked back to every place I’ve worked since then. It didn’t matter that I learned to drive on a stick-shift truck with half-working AC in Texas heat. It didn’t matter that I graduated in the top one percent of my high school class, or that I was accepted into a tier-one university and was in the four percent of applicants waitlisted at three of the top schools in the country. It didn’t matter that I stayed in classes amid a slew of health issues or led a campus organization.

Those voices can seep in and threaten to drown out any sound of truth. “Give up already,” they crooned. “Just give up. What’s the point in trying when you’ll only fail?” Somewhere deep, the countering voice in me would whisper, “You are not made to sit in defeat. You are made to walk confident, redeemed, and free… for each strength and each weakness is a gift that you are called to steward well.” And somehow, keep walking I did, even when I thought there was no way I could – because ultimately, that voice is the One that wins. But that has not been the voice that has dominated my thoughts, trapped in a cycle of familiar, endless repetition. When the refrain of Not Good Enough has become the beating soundtrack engrained into every day, every building, every activity, the loop is hard to break. 

Hard, but not impossible. 

Confidence came for me the way satisfaction comes after a meal: you can get food and start eating, yet remain hungry, until you suddenly realize in an unnoticed but unmistakable shift that you no longer need food, and that the lack of hunger is fullness. 

By this spring I’d had more than a year of recognizing how self-deprecation had left me alarmingly weak. I’d worked intently towards changing mental patterns that felt inextricable. I’d made progress. But my mind remained too comfortable running down all the old, familiar waterways, and confidence had not yet come.  

It came in Ecuador. It came when I got on a plane and flew to another country, less than a year after leaving town for the weekend would send me into a full-fledged panic attack. It came when I learned to navigate the crowded city buses even when I was sick and feverish. It came when a couple on the street asked me for directions around town. It came when I spent one of the best weeks of my life on a self-sustainable farm with compostable latrines and no toilet plumbing. It came when I learned to comfortably eat tilapia served whole: to lightly slip the meat right off the bones, head, and tail, with fish eyes staring straight at me. It came when I relocated to a new town alone while still recovering from E. coli and spent a month in a hostel by myself, after negotiating the price down to where I could get a private room within budget. It came when I found a place to worship with the joyous local church, among whom I was perhaps the only non-indigenous person in the room. It came when I landed a mini translation internship by showing up and talking for thirty minutes to a skeptical director in a place where my resume meant nothing – right after making a cold call inquiry that went about as badly as they can go. It came when I wrote a thirty-five page research report in Spanish about how the indigenous people in the northern sierra are establishing a voice for themselves through modern media after centuries of continued oppression.

It came every time I faced a feat I wanted to accomplish but didn’t think I could and went ahead and did it anyway.  

I found my own voice there – purer, unhindered, and still every bit my imperfect own. Refusing to back down, I pressed into each moment and witnessed fears give way. I learned to lean into the awkwardness, of which there was plenty in navigating a foreign country alone – or rather, I learned to lean into the moment and let the awkwardness flow around me as it would. It didn’t define me, and it didn’t define my interactions, and I didn’t remain trapped in it.

Because that’s the thing: at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what I feel my deficiencies are; it only matters what I do with them. The less I focus on my abilities – the less I get tripped up by scrutinizing myself under a microscope – the more I can accomplish with the gifts I’ve been given. I’ve watched myself achieve what I needed to do and seen that I could do it. 

I’m home now. I’m back in the old surroundings, and my mind quickly turns to trace those tracks, the eroded pathways formed by years of that seductive, destructive dripping. But I’ve explored different tracks now, too. Those new tracks don’t focus on quantifying my abilities. Instead, they accompany a different voice I like far better and am learning to follow. That voice rushes louder, a full current, and I can join its refrain as the other voices ebb and flow and begin to recede:

I am capable.