“If you stay in environments where people don’t recognize the value of you, you will shrink your gift to the size of what they can stand.  And that is what causes anxiety and depression and stress.  Because you have had to shrink into a form where people can tolerate you.  I refuse to be small because you think small.  I am not shrinking my vision because you can’t catch up.  You better roll with it or get rolled over,”  unknown (it came from a reel that showed up on my feed with an uncredited speaker).  I think every person on this planet knows what it means to not feel valued.  Not every person on this planet is raised to see their inherent worth, and if we don’t know our worth, we will never push ourselves to what we know we are capable of.  We become familiar with our surroundings, looking out thinking that something else would be nice but that it isn’t for us.  So we stay exactly where we are, and we create a sense of comfort in that familiarity even if it isn’t good for us, and before long, we are stuck where we are at.  We create a life that soothes over the ache of not having what we are meant to have.  We stay that way until we realize we have a choice in the mater and WE are the ones who define our worth.  It takes time, but we realize that if we see the value in our ideas, that’s enough. 

Human nature, for whatever reason, seems to dictate that we exert control over each other.  That we find value in other people through what they can give us or from the power they already have, from the things they’ve acquired or from the show they put on for us.  That then translates to our worth coming from the same thing—what we give others, what we acquire.  Until we are able to see beyond that, we tend to stay where we are with those self-soothing mechanisms I mentioned above.  If we stay long enough, we convince ourselves that our dreams were always small and insignificant anyway.  When we don’t give ourselves the chance to explore our ideas it’s easy to chalk them up to daydreaming or nonsense.  The truth is some of the greatest successes in this world came from a daydream, a feeling about a daydream, the thought that an idea someone had might be cool or there was potential in it.  I’m talking everything from the light bulb, to air conditioning, to the car, to Amazon.  If any one of those people had brushed off their idea as nonsense or insignificant, if any one of them had listened to someone tell them it would never work, where would we be now?  We live in the world we do with what we have because people told someone else to fuck off when they had an idea they knew/felt was right—even if that someone else was their own mind.

There comes a day when the voice we try to shut out simply won’t shut up.  If we are in an environment where we are merely tolerated and not celebrated, then we need to understand our own value and that our worth won’t be seen by others until we see it in ourselves.  We set our own value and it is up to us to maintain the boundaries around that value.  We don’t need to demand anything of anyone else, but if someone doesn’t match our energy or at the very least support it, then we know it’s time to move on and move away.  Once we see our worth, then we understand others will see it where we are meant to shine.  We are worth more than being tolerated.  Life is worth more than being tolerated or numbed away.  I have always believed every person has the capacity to be great and that we all just get a little stuck with distraction sometimes.  We believe what we are taught and what we experience and sometimes those things are limiting.  But if we are able to push beyond that the possibilities are endless.  I don’t claim any of that is easy, but standing up and claiming our space and ideas is far easier than shrinking into something that isn’t us.  I would rather risk standing up and falling than continue to chip away at a dream I’m meant to nurture and see through.  Don’t waste time or accept a lesser version of ourselves for the sake of another person.  Believe with everything, believe big.  Raise the bar for what WE tolerate in our own lives and take our seat at the head of the table rather than settle in the middle, hoping for a chance.  Take the shot.