Worth. No quirky titles, this one has drained me.

This post has been the bane of my mental world for the last few weeks. I have written and rewritten it, but I have been totally at a loss for how to make it say what I want it to say. A large part of the reason is that I don’t actually know what I am trying to say. My personal sense of worth and where I generate it from is bringing my self-awareness of who I am into question. I am tired and I am confused and I can’t turn back. To be dramatic about it, I am trapped in a personal worth vacuum. My external supply has been almost cut off and I have little to no skill to create it independently.

This needs more explanation, but I am trying to ‘radically accept’ (DBT lingo) that this post is likely to make little sense to anyone but me. I still think that it needs to be published though, otherwise things down the road are going to look like they came out of nowhere. I’ve been aware for many years that my sense of self is not well defined. There are many reasons for this and many examples I could give, but I am not going to go into that detail here. What is relevant right now is that the work I have been doing in DBT, in therapy and in my personal experiences, has made me see that most of my anxiety in relationships, professional settings and surrounding my lack of autonomy, comes down to the need I have for who I am, what I do and where I fit, to be defined by others. I just don’t have the skills to bolster myself up, praise myself and consider myself capable of achieving things. 

I cannot see my self-worth unless it is reflected back at me by how I interpret other people’s actions towards me. Yes, it is not even so simple as judging myself on how people treat me, it is based on how I interpret how they treat me. So, unless it is clear, direct and positive, there is more than enough room for me to interpret my existence to them as a hindrance, and therefore consider myself to be worthless, unlikeable and unloved. Even more so because I am not coming at these situations from a positive or confident place. If I believe 'they' do not see me as worthwhile, likeable and loved, I have no means of knowing myself to be anything else but worthless. One of the biggest consequences of this is an intense guilt when I try to do any thing that means I put myself first, like self care, having time alone or requesting something I need from someone else. There are so many nuances that I could write for pages and pages and would still never be able to fully convey where I am. If I wrote it all, the contradictions would end up making it more confusing than it already is.

To bring it to the point, the problem this awareness has brought is that I can now see how unhelpful and unsustainable it is to keep getting my self-worth fix from the interpretations I make of other’s thoughts about me. To take it a step further, I am beginning to think that it is unhelpful to expect any of my self-worth to come from anyone but me. People around me can probably offer space for reflection and insight, but they shouldn’t be the source of my opinion of myself. That is ridiculous. I won’t explain all the reasons why it is ridiculous, but trust me, it is.

So I need to find my self worth from within me. I should like myself, shouldn’t I? But how? I have no concept of how to like myself let alone see myself as valuable. This is a whole new skill set, one that I am starting from scratch. And in the mean time, I have gone cold turkey from my usual source. I have little lapses, but they are rough because I notice them just a fraction too late and, because I don’t like myself yet, I beat myself up over it.

And here we are. You have read all of that and made it to the final paragraph where all the paths I have drawn should come together in a heartfelt life anecdote, but not today. What I will do is share the project I have started in hopes that I will soon be able to write a better version of this post. My therapist has suggested an art project where I draw where I am now, where I want to be, and then draw a series of images that show how to get from one to the other. I’m not sure yet how this will translate into a sense of worth, but the process of creativity that I started this year has already helped me give awareness and order to my thoughts and emotions. I am hoping that having a directive art project will speed this process up a little.

‘Where I am at now’ is on the left, and ‘where I want to be’ is on the right. I’m not sure how the sharing process will work, but I will be sharing.