Lesson #8 From Rock Bottom
You have the right to be. You have the right to be here. And so do other people.
One of the most toxic and hurtful thoughts/feelings whose origins most likely lie in trauma and lack of adequate love and attention and acceptance that caused a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering and precipitated the fall to rock bottom was that I needed to justify my existence. No doubt this was coming from the voices of harsh judges and critics I had absorbed and how dysfunctional families work and how school and society is set up. ‘Justify your existence and prove your worth to me’ seem to say all the so called parents and teachers and employers and potential partners.
Now worth is important and it is important to judge and discern and select whom we choose to hire or marry or befriend. But you do not need to justify your existence to anyone. You are allowed to just be. You are allowed to be here. You don’t need to earn a place here on earth. You don’t need to be the best at everything or the most beautiful or most intelligent and accomplished in order to be here, to exist, to be treated with basic respect and civility and politeness and have your physical, emotional, mental boundaries respected. If you want to be those things because they are pleasing to you and matter to you and because you want to pursue excellence and the best, strongest, happiest, most successful version of yourself as defined by YOU, then that is an excellent purpose to strive for in life. Everyone has the right to exist though some people and their disgusting and morally reprehensible behavior would make you question that premise but they have the right to decide to be who they are and therefore, and this is the good news, they are responsible for who they are. The only people who aren’t responsible for themselves are children. And yes, there are people who live their lives in such a morally and emotionally reprehensible way that is damaging to themselves, to anyone they come into contact with, and even to society and the world and even to the point of giving the whole human race a bad reputation that one could quite confidently with enthusiastic agreement from other people, society, history say that the world would have been a better place had they not existed. Or perhaps had they not chosen to exist and live out their lives in such a way.
To return to the notion of worth, what I am trying to get at can be summed up in these three thoughts that all coexist and require room for nuance and complexity:
1) You do not need to justify your existence and have the right to be independently of any attribute or accomplishment. The only unconditional love is our love for ourselves and (ideally) love of parents for children.
2) Worth and value is objective and subjective. Not everyone will have worth to you based on your unique needs, tastes, feelings, preferences and that doesn’t make someone you don’t like a bad person necessarily but they are bad to and for you. And same goes for you. If someone doesn’t like you or want to be with you, then that is about them, their feelings, their physical and emotional experience of you, their perception of you which can be more or less distorted depending on the person, their priorities and values. Honor your priorities, needs, values, and be the version of you that you like the most, that is the most authentic and stable and self-realized. You want people who select to be with that version of you. Choose people who are you hell yes who make you their hell yes. Stated differently, your worth to someone is just that your worth to them. The only objective worth is determined, I think, by morality, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, empathy and compassion, respect for self and other and their boundaries. Appearance, money, even intelligence are good to have and necessary but not sufficient and will very quickly become repulsive if there is no emotional intelligence or morality and maturity. Worth is perhaps better thought of as qualifications. What qualifications do you want in your life that are important to you that will bring you joy and that you want to benefit yourself and others? And if someone doesn’t have the qualifications for a job or partner, respectfully send them on their way. Just because you don’t see their worth doesn’t mean they don’t have any. Just because someone doesn’t see your worth doesn’t mean you don’t have any.
3) Even if we all have the right to be unconditionally, we should still strive to be the best, strongest, smartest, bravest, happiest human beings we can be. We can love ourselves unconditionally and use that as the foundation upon which to build a strong sense of self-worth that is steady even in the face of disappointments, failures, rejections, misfortunes, abandonment, loss, grief. Let that unconditional love, respect, positive regard, and compassion be the replenishing and nourishing waters that help us grow. It is only when you love yourself unconditionally and accept every flaw and look at every flaw and mistake with compassion can you ever look at yourself, the work we have to do on ourselves, can you take action knowing you will be ‘bad’ at it at first and have some stumbles and make mistakes that help your brain to learn. That is the only way to learn I have found. Having a place of safety, peace, love, unconditional acceptance, benevolence, compassion, a refuge both within our mind and heart and how we speak to and treat and look at ourselves and without in our environment. That is the only way the monkey mind that gets scared and wants to run away from discomfort and difficulty will slowly with love and compassion and bravery by its side come to the table to sit and write and practice and get better. One must to face reality first in order to change it.
