Adventures with Sarah and Al

My husband and I have been cleaning up our digital storage. Turns out, I’ve never deleted a sent email since my email was born in ninth grade. It has been really fun looking through and laughing at myself—the dramatic subject lines, the too-long sign-offs, the earnest pleas for friendship, the copied-and-pasted AIM away messages (yes, really). But something caught me off guard: how deeply I craved belonging when I was a teenager. Email after email reflected this quiet, pulsing ache to be enough —to say the right thing, to perform the right role, to be someone worth keeping around. I could see myself trying so hard to fit into every possible version of “good”—the good student, the good daughter, the good friend. I wish I could go back in time just to tell that sweet high school student that she didn’t have to be everything to be enough. That she already was. I wish I could tell her that no matter what her accomplishments were—or weren’t—she was already worthy of love. I can’t go back in...

I. The Inner Critic Shows Up Early Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, I wake up at 5:30 AM to get to work early. Usually, I’ve done my prep the night before — packed snacks, chilled a Coke Zero, laid out my clothes. I also set out H’s school things for Al. These days, though, E’s been waking up around 4:30, so I rock him back to sleep before pretending to rest for ten more minutes. I do this not because I have it all together, but because it helps me protect some balance between home and work. As an adjunct professor, I do all my course prep at school — not just because it’s practical, but because it’s one way I remind myself: You are more than this job. But one morning, I just couldn’t hack it. I was only thinking about myself — and of course, that’s all my inner critic needed to hear. I got toothpaste on my blazer, we hadn't grocery shopped, so there were no easy snacks, and I ended up grabbing a breakfast sandwich and a soda on the way. The sandwich wasn’t filling, and the ...