"I Was Raised to Be a Good Person. Why Doesn't That Feel Like Enough?"

 "I Was Raised to Be a Good Person. Why Doesn't That Feel Like Enough?"

by:

Virgilio F. De leon Jr. MD

I was brought up to be a good person.

My parents, despite having only a middle-class income, gave generously to others because they believed in helping people. They taught us that if we had something to share, we should share it.

As siblings, we were never deprived of the essentials. We had a decent home, a good education, and opportunities that many ordinary Filipinos could only hope to have. Our parents provided for us as best they could, and I grew up knowing that I was fortunate.

Perhaps that was where I began to misunderstand what it meant to live a good life.

I measured myself against what I considered the bare minimum. As long as I did nothing illegal, treated my wife and daughter well, respected them, and provided for their needs, I thought I was doing what a good man was supposed to do.

Apparently, that was not enough.

I was told that I lacked the drive to achieve more, that I was aiming too low, assuming I was aiming at anything at all. One of the most painful things my mother ever told me, while she was still alive, was that I had never faced any real challenges.

I did not know what to make of that statement.

Perhaps she meant that I had been given a relatively comfortable start in life, that I had never been forced to fight for the things I wanted. Maybe she thought I had been spared the kind of hardship that would have pushed me to become more ambitious.

But I never thought that meant life would be easy.

Passing the Physician Licensure Examination was not easy. Building a life with my wife and navigating the responsibilities of raising a family were not easy. Learning to stand on my own, making decisions, and trying to become the person I thought I should be were not easy.

None of it was easy, and I doubt any of it ever will be.

Yet here I am, in my fifth decade of life, wondering whether I should have done more.

Somehow, my shortcomings have begun to feel like a verdict on the person I am. I find myself thinking that perhaps I should have dreamed bigger, taken more chances, or worked harder toward something beyond the life I managed to build.

Maybe I should have wanted more.

Maybe I should have done more.

And now, as I grow older, I am becoming painfully aware of all the things I lack without knowing how to fill those gaps. I look at the life I have and struggle to reconcile the person I was raised to become with the person I fear I have turned out to be.

The hardest part is feeling that I can no longer provide my family with everything I believe they deserve. I find myself wondering how much longer I can carry these disappointments without allowing them to become a burden on the people I love.

I was raised to believe that being good mattered. That helping others mattered. That treating people with kindness and doing right by your family were things worth striving for.

I still believe those things.

But somewhere along the way, I began to wonder whether goodness without ambition was enough, whether a decent man who tried his best could still be considered a failure because he had not achieved more.

I don't have an answer.

I only know that it is a difficult thing to reach this stage of life and begin questioning the very standards by which you have tried to live.

I wish I knew how to make peace with the things I did not accomplish. I wish I knew how to stop measuring myself against the person I might have become.

For now, I am left with the questions, the regrets, and the uneasy feeling that time is running out to become someone better.

I was raised to be a good person.

I only wish I knew why, after all these years, that no longer feels like enough.