“I won’t apologize for finally realizing that I am not hard to love, I’m just trying to heal in places that kept breaking me,” Jay Douglas.  I spent a lifetime seeking validation from everyone to the point of expecting them to tell me who I was.  Tell me what you need and I can (and will) do it.  I spent so much time trying to prove that I could be valuable and do what was asked of me that I didn’t spend enough time asking whether or not I should.  I never asked what I wanted and what I should do for myself.  I’d spend my days working my ass off to check off the items other people wanted me to do, trying to find some time to do what I enjoyed but the problem is, when you’re working to prove you can do anything there will always be something else to do.  A pattern developed where I would be available to anyone anywhere anytime and I started to get exhausted—I couldn’t keep up.  The pull of what I wanted to do became stronger and stronger and I started to resent those people who only wanted to be around me because I had no boundaries.  Another pattern developed where as soon as I started to set boundaries, people had an issue.

People with no boundaries often lack self-esteem.  They feel their worth is so low that they only way people will like them or accept them is if they are adaptable and do what they are told.  They believe their opinions aren’t worthy of being shared and they don’t want to be seen as difficult so they often agree with everyone around them.  And everyone likes them because they seem so low maintenance and they know they can go to that person when they need someone.  But once that individual requires something reciprocated or when they have a difference in opinion, suddenly they are seen as difficult or the bad guy.  Self-esteem isn’t just a buzz word—without enough of it we will accept an entire lifetime thinking our presence and beliefs and voices aren’t worthy of being expressed.  The human soul isn’t capable of being repressed that long and, while validation can be necessary at times, we can’t live a lifetime thinking we are the problem for every person.  The problem is we attract people who don’t respect our boundaries because we didn’t teach them those boundaries in the first place.

One of my greatest hopes is that everyone wakes up realizing their worth and that they are able to break the beliefs that made them feel like they were worth less than anyone else around them.  I want people to find their voices and find the rooms where their presences is missed, the rooms where even their whisper is heard no matter how loud it is.  I’ve experienced the alternative where the room was dead silent and I screamed my head off and no one even looked up and that was the moment I realized I was nothing more than a fixer to those people.  My presence was a problem until I was needed. Establishing belief in our own worth can be challenging at the best of times but those scenarios are devastating.  Those places that break us will never heal us.  So more than anything, I want to encourage people to understand their worth and their validity in this world and I want people to walk away from anyone who interferes with the inherent knowing of that worth.  We aren’t hard to love, we are just surrounded by people who don’t know how to love and they don’t see our worth because they likely don’t see their own.  Don’t apologize for removing ourselves as an option to those who consider us a choice in the first place.