I’m Jared Stanton.

Like you, I learned to abandon myself in childhood to be worthy of my parents’ love and acceptance. My father valued hard work and perfection. He’d say: “Good enough is never good enough.” So with the innocence of a child, I took on the belief that “It is not who I am that matters, but rather what I do. So I must be perfect at it.”

Inheriting his generational trauma, I learned that men are hard and sensitivity is weak. So I abandoned feminine qualities like compassion and empathy. I hardened my heart and learned to live in my head while muscling through problems “like a man.” The “manly” emotion was anger, which I used to mask my extreme sadness.

Named Jared Stanton Mueller because “J. Stanton” sounded to my father like a distinguished lawyer’s name, I chased the delusional mask of “success” hoping it would lead to his maniacally conditional love. And becoming a distinguished lawyer did allow me to achieve every societal metric of success. But checking off the boxes that are supposed to lead to happiness actually led to despair… Because desperately trying to fit a human-shaped peg into society’s square holes caused impostor syndrome, panic attacks, autoimmunity, introversion, suicidal ideation, and an inner critic reminding me daily that “I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself.”

Fortunately, I had “good enough” intuition to feel that it was not myself that I hated, but rather my subconsciously-created mask. My inauthenticity was ready to die. Therefore with inner work practicing awareness beyond thoughts and feelings, I harmonized my mind’s masculinity with my lost femininity. From wholeness, I see how all of the suffering that happened “to me” was for me to understand my origin story. I created it all to discover our Superhumanity.

Ready or not, you are always good enough. And “good enough” is, by definition, always good enough. You did your best, Dad. It was good enough for me to create something far beyond all our beliefs: myself.