Feeling Not Good Enough: The Divine Essence of the Undivine Matter
- Adina Bubu
- Aug 1
- 10 min read
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Ache of “Not Enough”
If you’ve ever experienced the feeling of not being good enough, you know the cringeworthy shame that comes after a creative spark, or sometimes (not to be dramatic 😅) just for existing. It’s the anxiety of not being good enough woven through daily life.
Since at Almas Collective, my aim is to help sensitive women connect more deeply with their soul’s desires and express them freely in the world, I figured you might relate to this inner block I often face.
My current struggle is
"How can I make sure that the divine expression manifesting through me is not distorted by my own ego needs?"
I’ve spent the last seven years trying to understand what’s “wrong” with me, constantly trying to fix, improve, or heal parts of myself that felt misplaced or broken. I’ve been on an endless mission to finally become... enough.
Today, I want to help both you (and let’s be honest, me, too 😆) reframe this deep-rooted belief, maybe not once and for all, but at least until the next meltdown. 💃
The truth? It’s painful. It was painful. And sometimes, it still is.
But what I’ve come to realize is this: when I allow myself to fully dive into the fear of not being good enough, to alchemize the “not-enoughness,” something shifts. Beneath the shame, I discover divine gratitude. A quiet reverence.
And in that space, I receive a gift: the energy of creation.
From that sacred thread, I can pour writing, ideas, or beauty into matter. From that space, I remember that I’ve always been enough. Because being is enough.
Symptoms of Not Being Good Enough
Perfectionism: When Creativity Meets Shame
And yet, until now, very few of these soul-born ideas have actually made it into the world.
I’ve had two business ideas that I completely abandoned before launching. I had everything ready: the website, the Instagram posts, the automations, and the offerings prepared. But I just could not launch it. I was sure everything was a mess, and I could not handle it.
It was the embodiment of “I’m not good enough.”
I remember one time in particular. I had set up an Instagram page just for fun, mostly for myself, with no expectations at all. But to my surprise, it started gaining organic traction. People were engaging. I even started receiving actual orders.
And yet, I began overanalyzing everything. I found faults, questioned the whole thing, and ended up shutting it down.
Later, I understood that the problem wasn’t the business or the product. It was me. I was projecting my insecurity of not being good enough onto them. I couldn’t see them clearly because I was looking through the lens of someone who never feels good enough.
Over-thinking: When the Ego Kills the Divine
Recently, I decided to witness another surge of energy and emotion move through me so I could dissect the sabotaging process.
I surprised the energy in writing and tried to witness it — but my mind started questioning the words, the intention behind it, if it really served or not, if it was too cheesy or too much.
That was the ego. That was the anxiety about not being good enough.
In Romanian, we call it the death of passion.
So I killed the piece. I didn’t let it see the light of day.
In the same way, I hide myself from others — in ways I can’t even comprehend. I deny myself, over and over, and I didn’t even realize how painful that was. Even if it’s not physical, it’s still emotional mutilation.
So how many times are you going to deny your longing to be witnessed? To be reborn again and again through your creation?
Start the book. Launch the business. Share the project. The worst that can happen is rejection. But the never being good enough feeling that comes from hiding is far more tragic.
And ironically, rejecting ourselves before others can is just another form of ego — an ego pretending to be humble, but secretly saying, “It’s never good enough unless it’s perfect.”
Feeling Unsafe: The Repressed Feminine
Through my healing work, I came to see that this pattern wasn’t just about creativity or perfectionism. It was about my relationship with safety — especially with masculine energy.
In situations where I couldn’t trust masculine figures in my life, I internalised that lack of safety. I overdeveloped my own inner masculine — becoming overly controlling, rigid, and obsessed with performance. It was never good enough.
This imbalance created power struggles within myself and repressed my feminine — my softness, my intuition, my creative flow.
And the more I repressed that energy, the more I found myself feeling unwanted and not good enough.
Because to create, you need to surrender. You need trust. You need to believe that being is enough.
A Shift in Perception: From Shame to Empowerment
Healing Paradigms
Lately, I’ve noticed more and more people, especially psychologists and trauma-informed voices, speaking out against the idea that trauma has any beneficial effect. The concern is that assigning meaning or purpose to traumatic experiences is spiritual bypassing. And I agree with this perspective to a certain extent. Trauma is a rupture, a violation, a distortion of safety and love. It should never be justified or sugar-coated.
Feeling anger and naming the people or systems that caused harm is a vital part of the healing process. Simply placing a spiritual band-aid over unprocessed wounds and calling it a blessing while triggers and unresolved pain continue to erupt beneath the surface is not only ineffective, but also deeply harmful.
At the same time, like most things in life, there are nuances. Each healing journey is different. It unfolds in layers, at different paces, and with different tools. No method is universal, and the only person truly qualified to choose the approach is the one doing the healing (as long as that choice is made from a space of deep attunement to the messages of the body, not from pressure, fear, or avoidance).
Any framework or therapeutic approach applied superficially, rigidly, or without integrity will keep the body stuck in survival. And sadly, this can happen on both sides of the spectrum. Some psychologists blame non-scientific healers, and some alternative therapists reject clinical psychology altogether. The truth is, harm can exist in both camps. I’ve had my share of unsettling experiences with practitioners from both ends — people more committed to their method than to my humanity.
Over the years, I’ve experienced traditional psychotherapy, particularly CBT-based approaches, as well as more intuitive therapies that work with emotion, energy, and the unseen realms of the psyche. And honestly, the more holistic and energy-aware practices often created the most profound shifts for me. It’s not because science doesn’t have value — it does. But it hasn’t yet caught up to the full complexity of human consciousness. While progress is being made, many in the clinical world are still stuck in the mental paradigm, seeking measurable proof, repeatable outcomes, and intellectual justification.
Seeing Past the Wounds
But healing isn’t always linear or logical. The deepest truths can’t always be accessed through cognition. They live in the body, in the heart, in the subtle field of our being. And staying only at the level of the mind will almost always prevent those truths from being fully revealed.
In my experience, these two approaches (the mental and the energetic) can absolutely coexist. I need to understand what happened. I need to name what should have happened, or what I needed and didn’t receive. But after that, I have to move into the emotional body, into the energy, and work with what still lives there. Only then can I begin to alchemize the pain and access the deeper resources it was hiding.
And yes, it’s true. Without certain painful experiences, I wouldn’t have developed some of the gifts I now hold. That doesn’t mean I’m grateful for the trauma itself. It means I’m grateful for what I was able to reclaim through the healing. Maybe without those wounds, I would’ve cultivated other gifts, but who are we to say which path is better? We don’t get to know that. All we can do is meet the path we’re on with honesty, care, and the willingness to keep returning to ourselves. Again and again.
What I’ve noticed in my own journey is that I sometimes get stuck in a resistance loop of “what could have been” or “why did this happen to me?” Why couldn’t they give me what I needed? These questions seem valid on the surface, but when they become repetitive and obsessive, they keep me in a state of hopelessness. They disconnect me from my power. They anchor me in a story that tells me I am broken, and that my worth depends on fixing something that might never be undone.
For years, this loop kept me trapped in the belief that if I could just heal one more wound, find one more answer, then maybe I would finally feel worthy. And as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spent the last seven years frenetically searching for ways to heal the deep-rooted feeling that something is inherently wrong with me. It’s not that I haven’t made progress — I have.
But I also reached a point of exhaustion. Because every trauma I “healed” seemed to unveil another one waiting to be mothered, processed, and soothed. It became a never-ending spiral of emotional caretaking — a constant nurturing of what often felt like hideous, energy-draining creatures living inside me.
Eventually, I realized there had to be another way.
Reframing Trauma
And this is where reframing became essential. Not to bypass or minimize the pain — but to give it context, to create meaning that could lift me out of the victim role without denying the depth of the experience.
Adding a layer of compassion
At the beginning of my therapeutic journey, I was obsessed with understanding how I could possibly accept the unacceptable parts of myself. Then one day, I came across an idea that shifted everything. It was from Debbie Ford’s book The Dark Side of the Light Chasers — a quote that said something along the lines of: “Flaws are just exaggerated strengths.”
That sentence lit something up in me.
It invited me to consider that maybe what I had spent years rejecting wasn’t inherently wrong — it was just amplified. For example, someone who’s told they’re “too much” might simply be a brilliant communicator with unfiltered expression. Someone “too sensitive” may actually have a heightened capacity for empathy and energetic awareness. That kind of reframing didn’t make the pain go away, but it gave me just enough space to stop whipping myself with constant self-criticism. It softened the internal voice that kept repeating, “you’re not enough,” and allowed me to approach those parts with curiosity instead of shame.
Dismantling The Ego’s Game: Judgment, Separation, and the Illusion of Lack
Another important reframing that helped me shift out of the “never enough” loop was the idea of accessing the hidden gem within each experience, a concept I touched on earlier.
There’s a well-known spiritual principle that says the soul chooses certain life experiences (even difficult or painful ones) to create the necessary soil for growth. This is often where psychological and spiritual frameworks collide. In more clinical circles, this kind of belief can be seen as dangerous or bypassing. But the essence of it is actually quite simple and grounded: every experience carries both advantages and disadvantages in equal measure.
The ego will always judge from a place of lack. It will demand more — more money, more recognition, more love, more worth. No matter what you achieve, it will whisper: “It’s still not enough.” This is why, no matter how polished the project or perfect the outcome, something will always feel off. When life doesn’t meet our expectations, the ego labels it as wrong, bad, or unfair. In that moment, we lose access to the bigger truth.
The ego also needs a villain. It thrives on judgment and separation. There’s always an abuser and a victim. A “right” way and a “wrong” one. Ever found yourself thinking, “I would never do that”? That’s the ego speaking — not the whole of you.
The irony is, in a different context, a different form, we have all played roles we now condemn. Sometimes we were the abuser. Sometimes the betrayer. And when we refuse to see this, we don’t become more innocent — we become fragmented.
Here’s the twist: the more we reject parts of ourselves, the more we reinforce the feeling that we are not enough. Sounds counterintuitive, right? We want to feel whole, but only accept our light. We chase self-worth, yet deny our shadow.
But wholeness doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from integration. From allowing ourselves to be fully human — both fierce and fragile, sacred and messy, tender and powerful.
Because the truth is: you don’t become enough by rejecting the darkness. You become enough by embracing all of you.
Once we can bring our whole being, not just our mind, but our emotional and spiritual selves to the experience and truly see both sides, we begin to unlock a deeper truth. We stop identifying with the polarity of “good” or “bad,” and we begin to perceive the meaning in the space between them.
That’s where gratitude begins to arise, not as a mental exercise, but as a felt, embodied recognition of life’s intelligence. And this state of gratitude becomes the very fuel for divine creation that I mentioned at the beginning of the article.
At this point, I often notice that the negative patterns rooted in the belief “I’m not good enough” can simply dissolve, not because they were forcefully changed, but because they are no longer needed. What remains is a profound peace. A quiet knowing that I am good exactly as I am, and that I can handle whatever adjustments or consequences may arise along the way.
Other times, this inner shift is followed by a more active phase, a conscious process of observing and dismantling the harmful patterns, one by one. Not out of urgency or shame, but from a place of self-respect and quiet devotion to my own evolution.
This is how we complete the circle, not just within the context of this article, but within each lived experience. Each time we choose to see the whole truth of what happened, without collapsing into victimhood or bypassing the pain, we reclaim a little more of ourselves.
And perhaps, when we begin to truly appreciate life for what it is, not for what we hoped it would be, we also begin to appreciate ourselves for who we are — not for who we think we should be. From that place, the feeling of not being good enough begins to dissolve. It loses its power because we stop holding the measuring stick.
And really, who am I to judge whether I’m good enough or not?
And in that spirit, I’ll leave you with the “whiny 😆” little poem I wrote during the energy surge I told you about earlier.
I almost didn’t share it. But this time, I won’t kill it.
This time, I’ll let it live.
Who am I to question my soul’s desires?!
To mud them with my earthy thoughts and wonderings?
I stop the flow with judgment, distorting the truth in translations
that are not meant to be understood but deeply embodied.
I am not supposed to speak in words,
But let the energy move through me and thus move the energy in you.
I am yet to learn the humble gift of surrendering
to a force that is not called power, but simply… “love”
I am using words that feel so small
I want to serve, but my limited ways seem unfitted for this honour
This is both the gift and course of the humanly matter.
Only the divine is perfection, so let go of the ego’s pretenses and
Enjoy the gifts and beauty of this uneven existence.
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