How Do You Find Your Own Worth?

As I prefaced on instagram, I am not a professional. I’m not a therapist or a counsellor and so I can’t even pretend to know where someone's personal feelings of worthlessness begin or why some of us feel we’ll never be enough. What I can say, is that if you are feeling like you aren’t enough, you’re not alone. I have a sneaking suspicion that’s something I’ll say a lot in these blogs but I think it’s good to be reminded that other people often feel the same way you do and I know that because on this particular occasion because I’m one of them. 

Firstly, society has a weird way of making people feel like knowing your worth is somehow big headed or arrogant. It’s not. It’s simply knowing what you’re capable of and having confidence in  your abilities. It’s knowing yourself better than others claim to know you. That’s not arrogance. That’s simple self awareness. You are allowed to feel worthy and you are allowed to feel like you’re enough. You don’t need permission from the people around you. 

It took me years before I felt like I could own the space I took up. I grew up in a world where I was always told “your brother is the reason for [insert personal achievement here]”. I was made to feel like I had to be in a constant state of gratitude before I could even think about congratulating myself. I could have become...I dunno...Jiu-Jitsu champion of the world and someone would have told me that I owed it to McFly. Then as I got older, I ended up working in an industry I hadn't technically trained to work in and was surrounded by people who had. In order to make sure no one ever said “you’re only here because of your brother” I went into overdrive to try and prove myself every single night. I burnt myself out in a scarily short space of time and kept burning myself out month after month for the next few years. 

There were lots of reasons that made me shrink away from taking up too much of the space I had allocated for myself, just in case I looked ungrateful or big headed. I figured I’d rather be too little than too much. I can tell you now, it was exhausting. Not only because I felt like I was on best behaviour 24/7 regardless of who I was in front of but also because I spent my days letting other people’s words dictate every decision. I was placing so much importance on what other people thought of me and not what I thought of myself. I was constantly asking questions like “Am I being too much? Am I taking up too much space? Did that sound too aggressive? Did I say the right thing? Am I smiling too wide? Am I dressed inappropriately?” And regardless of what my own answers were to those questions,  it would take a single word from a single stranger in a single tweet to confirm all my worst fears. I could never just be confident in who I was without checking in with everyone else first. And by "everyone else", I don't mean family and friends or the people whose opinions I valued. I mean strangers on the internet who didn’t even know me, who I would never meet and who probably didn’t have my best interests at heart. Because why would they? Why should I expect them to? I spent years putting the emphasis on how the world perceived me and not how I perceived the world. I let other people tell me my place even when I knew exactly where I was meant to be standing. I should have been focusing inwards, listening to my head and my heart and instead I focused outwards and listened to the voices of others even when what they were saying was in complete contrast to what I knew to be true. Yet, I still believed their words and ignored my own. It skewed my perception of everything for longer than I care to admit. 

What I’ve learned from all of this is that words like “worth” and “enough” mean different things to different people. To me being “worthy” and being “enough” don't look like "perfection". To me they simply look like trying. Trying to be a good, fair, well intentioned, good natured, warm hearted person. I may not always succeed and there have been and will be mistakes but those mistakes shouldn’t make me unworthy of the space I take up. Others might try and tell me they do and that’s when I need to hold on to the “me” that I know myself to be. I’ve been told I’m a bad person. Someone recently said I was “barely human”. A few years ago that would have destroyed me back down to my bare foundations. This time around I laughed because I know it’s not true. I have enough of a grip on myself now to know what is fact and what is someone's fiction. I f*** up and I say stupid s*** that I regret the moment it leaves my face but I apologise, I learn, I grow and I move on. That’s all anyone can ask of anyone else. As long as I know that I’m constantly in a state of striving to be good, I am worthy and I am enough. 

So my advice would be to try and see yourself through your own eyes and not through the eyes of others. Ask yourself questions and don’t look to others to give you the answers when you probably already know the answers anyway. It’s always nice to hear from other people you’ve done a good job or that you’re appreciated and loved but we shouldn’t have to constantly rely on others for validation. Life isn’t fair and sometimes you’ll be waiting for that validation forever. It has to come from you first and foremost. So ask yourself what being worthy and enough looks like to you and work towards that. The only person you ever have to be enough for is yourself.