You Matter No Matter What

Image: John Tyson Unsplash

Do you feel like you have to earn your place here on earth?

Do you feel like no matter what you do it’s not good enough?

Do find judgment is stopping you from trying new things?

Do you have a strong inner critic telling you that what you’re doing isn’t enough?

Are you constantly seeking external validation to provide you reassurance?

Some of us had childhoods that taught us that we were a burden, that we were in competition with other people to earn love and appreciation, some of us never received the validation in childhood that would have set us up for a life not seeking it. Those stories that we created out of those moments aren’t the truth, you are not a burden, you are just as worthy as your siblings, and you matter no matter what anyone else says or does.

Those stories are created from a time when we had no capacity to rationalise what was happening to us. Our stories are often passed down from the generation before us, from our mother’s and father’s and their life experiences which were running the show. They often hadn’t processed them, and they intentionally or unintentionally passed them onto us. We can acknowledge that most of the times they did the best they could with what skills they had, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t leave destruction behind them.

“We don’t heal this story by trying to prove ourselves to others and seeking their validation because it will often feel hollow”
Sarah Yeoman

Image: Dan Meyers Unsplash

We don’t heal this story by trying to prove ourselves to others and seeking their validation because it will often feel hollow and not enough. I’m going to be honest this is hard, hard to know that you are inherently worthy just for being you. It gets bandied around like confetti in the personal healing space, but what does it actually mean to feel worthy. I can’t fully answer that because I’m living this, this is part of my story. What I do know is that we have to acknowledge that it is running in the background a large percentage of the time. Layers of it will show up in different situations, when your with friends it will look different to when you are at work and then again different with family. There is no simple solution to turn that voice off, it’s recognising it when it’s present and how it shows up. For some of you it’s that constant tug that keeps you asking “is this, okay?” because it never feels like it is enough or “right”. Or it might show up as saying yes when you really want to say no because you want to be needed. For others it might be that you shrink in the presence of certain people because of how they make you feel. Learning the sign is one of the first ways that you can shift the dynamics of this story.

Awareness is the first key to create shifts and changes, it’s when you’ve caught yourself in a repeating pattern that your power returns. It’s what you do next that creates the change, choosing a different action that is more aligned with the outcome you desire is important. Moving beyond the urge to seek validation about what you want to do next, choosing you over them teaches you that you matter and that what you want matters and that what you do matters. You don’t need external validation to matter, giving yourself your own validation is what matters in that moment when you are unsure and seeking answers outside of yourself or the urge to prove yourself to another. It will probably take practice and that’s perfectly normal and you will come up against this more than once I can promise you that, because while writing this I went searching for validation about how to write this blog because I thought my way couldn’t possibly be the “right way” but in the end it was the perfect way for me.