“You were enough when they overlooked you.  The way you exist is enough.  You owe no one an apology for being who you are,” Kyle Fuller.  The world is full of people who think they get to determine what people are worth.  People who think they have the right to tell others their opinion of their worth.  We’ve made it a norm—we put dollars to the work people do and give raises according to the quality of work (because we all know merit is 100% based on the quality of our work, right?). It’s entirely subjective and we think this is normal.  We judge how people make money, how they spend it and we make assumptions of their character based on how they look.  We critique their actions (tell me you’ve never called someone a shitty driver) and interpret their actions toward us.  No matter what we do, no matter where we are, there are some people who won’t see our value.  Intentional or not, there are people who don’t see the full picture, nor do they care to and they decide who we are and where we rank in their opinion.  Those people only see us for the value we can provide.  No matter what we do, we will not convince these people of our worth.

I have fought battles to prove my worth, my right to exist to people who didn’t give a shit no matter what I did.  I have fought the barrage of bullshit people slung about me—that they told others and those people swallowed those opinions as fact without speaking to me.  I never wanted to come across as a victim-the concern about how people saw me was just more concern about other people’s perception of me-and that was fine until opinions started dictating what I could and couldn’t do in my life, the opportunities available to me. Not addressing the actions of people misunderstanding me and the feelings that came with it led me to do really misaligned/fucked up things from jumping through hoops for people I barely new, putting on a show and not acting like myself, to trauma bonding and oversharing, and hurting myself if I didn’t live up to their expectations—or worse, when I did what they wanted and they still left me hanging.  It was all trauma response.  Opinion shouldn’t matter but when your progress is stopped by opinion, it matters.  I started to believe their perception and it fucked me up.  It really did leave me lacking and questioning who I am.  I also knew I had a lot of good in my life so I didn’t want to seem ungrateful.  But being grateful doesn’t mean being silent. 

We can love and speak honestly, we can be open to honesty, but we also need to discern what people know versus what they think they know—and whether or not it matters. I stayed silent and I internalized and I hurt myself and I blamed God.  This isn’t a religious segue, this is where the beginning of my questioning and deterioration (at least the holes) in my faith started to show.  Irrational as it may seem, I blamed Him for making me prove myself to others and never being enough for anyone here while somehow being too much, and for not having that proof/validation I sought from Him.  I felt I was an awful person because if I was a worthy person, why did I have to fight to prove it?  The fact I had to fight must mean I was unworthy on some level. Those instances I tried to push forward and became more insistent on doing things to make people see me, the worse it got.  Eventually I felt like I heard nothing.  I never considered I was simply in the wrong environment.  It took a long time to acknowledge the possibility and even longer to have the courage to get honest about where I was and whether or not I even wanted to be there.  Why was I fighting for validation in a place that decided my worth and I didn’t even want to be there in the first place?  The wrong environment can make you feel sick.  Sometimes God is just trying to get us to move.  I was never stuck with those people who made me feel less than.  Neither are any of you.  Remember your worth and remember you can move if you need to before you believe any BS someone tries to sell you on things they don’t know.