What if you've never actually had low self-worth?
Unworthiness,
A big fat lie.
What if your life and your choices not bringing you what you deeply desire,
The relationships that don't feel right,
Perhaps we feel invisible,
Not valued or disrespected,
Or jobs that don't pay well or are toxic but we stay,
Or money that perhaps comes into our life but simply doesn't stay very long,
Wishing to be slimmer,
Fatter,
Younger,
Older,
More this,
Less that?
What if it all has nothing to do with self-worth issues and everything to do with longing?
Let me explain.
When we're children,
Home is the world.
Until about the age of seven or eight,
What happens in our household is reality to our nervous system.
If that world was full of chaos,
Worry about illness,
Financial stress,
Lots of noise,
A caregiver who was overwhelmed,
Emotional unpredictability or any form of threat,
Fear or unsafety,
A child cannot simply leave.
So the nervous system does something extraordinary.
It actually saves us.
It lifts us out of the room we may be in and places us up in the sky,
Into imagination,
Into dreaming,
Into one day it will be better.
This is not weakness,
This is intelligence.
It keeps hope alive,
It keeps energy moving,
It keeps the child alive inside.
Now if it happens once or twice,
That's a sign of resilience.
But if life continues to feel unsafe,
The place we escape to can slowly stop being a visit and start becoming who we are.
We don't just long sometimes,
We become longing.
And before we know it,
We're walking through adulthood with an invisible bright yellow post-it note stuck to our forehead that says,
I am longing.
And wonderful life responds accordingly.
We attract the jobs that almost fit,
The partners that almost see us,
The partners that kind of commit,
The money that almost stays,
The opportunities that almost land.
Everywhere we look,
It seems that something's not quite right,
Something's missing.
Not because we're broken,
Not because we lack worth,
But because the nervous system learnt,
Home is somewhere else,
Relief is later.
I am not there yet.
And here comes the very profound twist,
That if you truly believed you were worthless or had any kind of issue with low self-worth,
You wouldn't ache,
You wouldn't feel the sadness of misalignment.
The pain is actually evidence of something magnificent,
A quiet inner knowing of who you really are.
It's pulling you back,
It's a sign that you're not living in your value,
In your truth.
So the work is not to fix self-worth or to find self-worth or to build self-worth.
The work is to gently remove the post-it note,
To notice when you're living in longing rather than living in life,
Right here,
Right now.
To pause when choices arise and to ask yourself,
Does this feed my old identity of being in longing?
Will my longing continue if I make this choice?
Or does this choice move me now toward belonging?
Longing is not the enemy.
Longing gave you imagination,
Hope,
Vision,
Creativity.
But longing was meant to be a bridge,
Not a home,
Not a castle and certainly not a prison.
The moment you realise you are not unworthy,
The moment you realise that you can't be unworthy,
The moment you realise every suffering,
Every pain is bringing you back to remind you that you are already worthy and can be nothing else,
The moment you recognise that you have perhaps simply been living in an old survival identity,
Everything changes.
Because you stop trying to become enough,
You stop longing and in turn you start allowing yourself to belong,
Right here,
Right now.
And from that place of belonging,
All the magnificence you ever dreamt of can come home to you.
