What if You Weren't So Hard on Yourself?

What if you knew that you were already enough? I love all of this advice so much

I’m currently flying back on the plane after Spring Break and thumbing through my phone, looking at all the pictures of our trip, relishing what we managed to accomplish with three kids under eight.

And I’m also internally chastising myself for giving screens to my kids on the long car ride back to Vegas for our flight, for not packing good snacks for the plane, for once again giving them all the screens on the plane, worrying that the baby watches too much Gabby’s Dollhouse and it’s turning her brain to glitter slime. I’m a little panicked about taking time away from work and playing catch up this week—even though I worked every single day through this vacation and wrote the last chapter of a book (The Lost Masterpiece!).

My brain is a constant hamster wheel of feeling like I’m not enough.

A couple of weeks ago, I flew down to Tampa to do a sprint triathlon with Nick Aster. We like destination sprint triathlons because they don’t require too much training, and we get to fly away from our kids for the weekend. You also feel amazing afterward and you’re done by 9 a.m., leaving plenty of time for a bar and bookstore crawl.

Going into this race, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do the running part. My knees have been acting like crabby little bitches, and the 10-mile bike and half-mile ocean swim already seemed like plenty. I’d meant to switch to the aquabike category (just swim and bike), but never got around to it. So after the biking portion of the race on Saturday, I just… stopped. I felt great. I felt like I’d accomplished something. I didn’t feel like huffing through a 5K.

When I told the nice old guy at the check-in gate that I was finished, he said, “Don’t you want to walk it and finish?”

“No,” I replied. “At my age, I’m just not meant to live an uncomfortable life.”

I posted about it on Instagram, and my friend Melissa Arnot—a world-class mountain guide, six-time Everest summiter, and the first American woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen—sent me a note congratulating me. Not for doing the triathlon. But for knowing myself. For knowing when to stop. For feeling like enough.

Melissa and I talked about this on Under the Influence, and I wanted to share more of our conversation below.

Because if you’ve ever felt like you're not doing enough, achieving enough, or being enough—even as you’re crushing it—you’re not alone. Melissa has climbed the highest mountain on Earth, but her memoir Enough isn’t about Everest. It’s about everything women carry on the way up. Comment ENOUGH below to be entered to win a copy of this gorgeous book. Her advice at the end of this interview has become a personal mantra. I even wrote it on a sticky and put it above my desk. I hope you love it as much as I do.

Jo: I want to start with a line early in your book. You wrote, “Could I rise above being average, a place where I had resided most of my life?” You were climbing Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen when you had that thought. But based on everything you’d already done, you were anything but average. Why did you still feel that way?

Melissa: I say this in the book—you might think I’m baiting you by saying I’m average. But it was this idea I had, where just showing up as myself, I could sort of get into the rooms I wanted to be in. But I couldn't be taken seriously. I couldn't be seen as somebody who belonged. And so, deep underneath that thought of "being average got me here," I had this tempting idea: what if I could get beyond here?

Jo: And you weren’t just talking about your climbing.

Melissa: No. I was talking about breaking free of the limits I was holding for myself in my own mind—my sense of enoughness, my sense of belonging. It’s ironic because I went into an environment and a place where nobody looked like me. I was trying to prove that I could exist athletically in this extreme space, but the truer truth was that I was trying to prove that I internally was enough.

Jo: Which is such a universal experience, right? That voice in our heads that says, "I’m not doing enough. I’m not working hard enough. I need to strive for more."

Melissa: Yes. That wheel is exhausting. And for so long, I believed that if I achieved some external success—something nobody could say I didn’t do—then I would believe I was enough. But I had to heal that worth wound first. I had to know I was enough before I could actually do the thing.

Jo: It’s what makes this so much more than a climbing memoir. You write about your childhood with such honesty. Your parents had their own struggles—addiction, mental illness, volatility.

Melissa: My mother had a phenomenally addictive personality, and her main vice was weed. Most people dismiss that very quickly, like, "Oh, I wish my parents were addicted to weed." But my mother, especially when she was stoned, would morph into a raging mother bear. My life and existence became so tenuous and unpredictable.

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