NOTES ON SELF-WORTH

It’s knowing when you deserve an apology and knowing when you owe one. It’s being forgiving and opening your heart up to second chances but not peeling your skin back to hand your heart to someone who doesn’t know how to handle it. It’s giving yourself the space to grow, learn, and make mistakes. It’s walking away from a situation that no longer serves you and understanding it’s not personal if someone does the same. It’s knowing when something is right or wrong for you and having the strength to act accordingly. It’s appreciating the opinions of others but not scratching them into the soles of your feet as though they are the foundation on which you are built. It’s knowing boundaries and respecting them. It’s being soft and open and loving but knowing when those things are going to hurt you. It is not confidence or arrogance or believing yourself to be someone you’re not, it is simply understanding that the things your hands hold are worthy of your touch, and the words you speak are worthy of being heard.

We tend to attach the idea of self-worth to an abundance of things it’s not. We often belittle ourselves into the ground to avoid anyone mistaking it for vanity, believing that to know what we deserve paints confidence in ugly colours. Too often, we take our worth and place it in the palms of others and sit it on the tips of their tongues; the way we are treated becomes the benchmark we pin ourselves to, lowering and raising ourselves respectively. We settle ourselves into situations that we don’t belong in, shrinking our limbs into spaces we’ve outgrown because we don’t trust our throats enough to speak our truths. We fumble for external validation, grasping for reassurance in the dark and clinging onto it in an attempt to replicate ourselves into what receives the most praise. I have, time and time again, found myself bereft of confidence and sought to seek it from others as if it is something I can borrow and return when I figure out how to create it for myself. I have torn myself apart and attempted to stick the pieces back together, a patchwork stitched and unstitched until I found a version that other people liked.

Over the years, my self-worth has been something I’ve had to establish and take responsibility for. I spent so long living by the notion that approval made me valuable. I never thought self-worth was something I got to decide, instead, I handed it over to other people and let them think that how I should be treated was their choice to make. I placed my self-worth on the shoulders of social media, on how I was perceived by other people, on whether I was wanted, on my achievements, on how successful I believed I was or wasn’t. I emptied myself of everything I thought I didn’t deserve and decided I needed to earn it. I only felt worthy of something if I had something to show for it, reasons stacking up on piles of torn paper in a fragile attempt to convince myself I was good enough. Placing my self-worth on such delicate means taught me how easily it could collapse.

Confidence and self-worth are not the same thing. Over the last few months, I’ve realised that my self-worth is something that has kept me afloat in situations that I struggled to swim in. I used to believe that self-worth meant you thought you were above things, a preempted idea that anything that presented itself to you wasn’t good enough. We live in a society that turns anything we do for ourselves sour, and in turn, we swallow our words and avoid standing up for ourselves in favour of saving face. Brick by brick, I am trying to tear down the wall I have built between myself and the things I know to be true about myself.

I listened to a podcast recently by Kalyn Nicholson and she was speaking about self-worth and how it’s all you need to overcome any kind of heartbreak. One thing she said that stuck with me in particular was that our self-worth is comprised of our standards and our values; our standards being what we accept from the outside in and our values being what we accept from the inside going out. This brought simplicity to self-worth that I had missed all this time. My self-worth is not what I think about myself or my abilities, it is instead that I know how I deserve to be treated, and I know how other people deserve to be treated by me. I have been through various situations recently in which my self-worth has enabled me to trust myself enough to do what’s right for me. Self-worth is not stitched into our abilities to make people like us and approve of us or in what we can and can’t do, it is instead our ability to be true to ourselves and trust ourselves in knowing what’s best for us.

People will come and go from our lives, and we will love and lose over and over again without always knowing why. We will get things wrong and take the falls as the collateral damage of other people getting things wrong, but as phases of life turn to dust and settle in the cracks of our floorboards, it is our self-worth that will hold the walls up around us. As we walk away from people and people walk away from us, our souls are rooted in our beings, our self-worth holding us together at the seams and stopping us from falling apart.