What The Rabbit Box Teaches Us About Being Enough

One of many affecting passages from Joseph Pintauro and Norman Laliberté’s The Rabbit Box

A passage from The Rabbit Box stopped me cold.

I’ve never felt like I was enough.

I didn’t have a girlfriend in high school. I didn’t have one during my first two years of college, either. I was beginning to think that no one would see me as good enough to be with.

I struggled with my flaws, convinced they were obvious to everyone—certainly to any girl I met. I felt like I had DO NOT ENTER tattooed across my forehead.

Then one summer, I unexpectedly met this girl:

Monterey Peninsula, August, 1976

Despite my having zero dollars and an unclear future (not to mention a horrible haircut and a horrendous fashion sense), she loved me.

Like it says in The Rabbit Box, I waited for her to fall in love with someone else. To tell me she was leaving. That I was hopeless.

But she never did.

Fifty years later, here we are in virtually the same place:

Monterey, California, 2026

“I’m faced with the biggest terror of my life, knowing I am enough, even at my worst, for you to love me all your life.”

What a hauntingly beautiful passage. “Knowing I am enough, even at my worst!” How many of us can ever feel that way?

I've never believed I am enough, even at my best. Believing I'm enough, even at my worst, seems impossible.

Whether it’s been as a son, brother, student, athlete, husband, father, teacher, writer, grandfather—as anything, I’ve never felt confident enough to think, I’m enough.

Finding people who’ll love us even when we are at our worst is like finding the greatest treasure.

And it's a gift we have the power to give others: to love them not just at their best, but at their worst, too.