struggling through...

I have a bad habit of looking straight to the end of things. I'm a big picture person, but big picture in the most finite sense of the word finite.

Sounds oxymoronic, right? Oh, honey -- I know it.

Here's how my brain works: I see all of the little tiny details as they should be in the completed picture, all at the exact same time. Right now, I'm looking at a tree -- or at least, a tree that I'm envisioning in my mind. 

I see the entire tree at the same time I see each vein in every single leaf. I see how tall and wide it is, leafy and green with a brown trunk, simultaneously with the intricate ridges and curves in the bark. I see the big and the little in the same moment. 

Then I see what's beyond the tree: the seed, how it grew from a sapling to a giant, the rain and the sun that fed it, the birds that lived there, the snow and sun that laid their weight on its branches, and that the tree will one day fall to the earth -- the ways it can fall, when it can fall, which direction -- so many possibilities. And seeing the new trees that will come from the rotting limbs, and will feed those trees as the limbs were fed while a little tree.

That's how I see life. All of it, all at once. The past, present, future in an instant, all of the tiny details and the infinite elements.

It's exhausting. Exhausting in the sense that my brain is never quiet. I can never stop seeing and observing, thinking and experiencing. Exhausting in the sense that I constantly see the potential outcomes -- the multiplicity of things that might be, could happen.

I'm struggling with all of the seeing. My potential outcomes are generally negative -- failure, disappointment, heartache, sorrow -- I see potential negatives at every turn. I feel sadness, shame, guilt, fear -- a dying, twisting, rotting tree, decaying from the inside out because inside, it wasn't good enough.

Failing -- I may fear that more than anything else in the entire world. Not being good enough, not choosing the right things, not having it perfect.

I feel so deeply. I think so hard. I try and try, against all of the ever-pressing obstacles that throw themselves in my way. Yet, it never seems to be enough. 

Will I ever be enough?