Kelen Tamurian is a high school senior living in Washington state and an aspiring activist for human rights. She has struggled with her mental health and for most of her life felt that she wasn't good enough. Over the last year, she has found her writing style and she felt called to share the story of Hope, a young teenage girl in high school who doesn't feel good enough in any facet of her life.
Through her book, SIMPLY Not ENOUGH, Kelen is demonstrating that this feeling is so universal as she believes that every single person on this earth has experienced the emotion of not feeling good enough, whether it was for a minute, a month, a year, or one's entire lifetime.
When we believe that we are not good enough we engage in activities or habits that detract from our overall wellbeing because we are trying so desperately hard to feel that we are enough. We strive for that perfect grade, losing hours of sleep and missing out on fruitful relationships. We seek to shrink our physical bodies through over-exercising or restricting our food intake because we think that if we can just get to that size 0 we will be pretty enough, thin enough, and worthy enough of affection and attention. We avoid getting too intimate with others because we do not believe that we are good enough to have and sustain a relationship where we dive below the surface level and go deep with each other.
When we believe that we are not good enough, all things surrounding wellness go out the door because nothing about believing that we are not good enough supports it. The foundation of our belief is rooted in the idea that we are unworthy, and by believing that we are not good enough we close ourselves off to the pathways of nourishment.
That is why Kelen believes that mental health is the foundation of wellness because without it we can not engage in habits or activities that truly support our overall well-being. We can not live our fullest, happiest, most courageous lives if we don't take the first step to evaluate our mental state and take action to move toward a place of understanding within ourselves to know that we are worthy, we are capable, and we are good enough.