Category: Self Worth

  • Labelling humans

    Labelling humans

    We dehumanise the human when we label their emotional experience as an illness.

    The moment we attach a label to a life experience, we focus on the label and discard the merits of the experience.

    We make people invisible when we deny the reality of their experience by suggesting that there is something clinically wrong with them, despite causality of their emotional upheaval being clearly associated with their experiences in life.

    In other words, there is a clearly troubling or traumatising experience that they’ve endured to explain their emotional duress, yet we diminish their experience by ‘diagnosing’ them with an illness for feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or stressed, etc. simply because they’re affected by it for longer than we think they should be affected by it.

    The victim readily embraces such labels because it offers hope where they feel hopeless, and allows them to abdicate responsibility for rising above it.

    The oblivious or insensitive ones happily embrace such labels because it demands less emotional investment, or less accountability in their efforts to uplift or support those around them.

    Our aversion to embrace the entirety of the human behind the troubled behaviour denies the victim a voice, or an opportunity to understand their painful experiences in life.

    These labels are worn with shame because it denies us our humanness and makes us a symptom.

    You cannot break the stigma of mental health by undermining the humanness of the ones affected by the stigma.

    Kill the label, kill the stigma.

    If you stigmatise someone’s real life experience, how can you possibly expect them to feel whole?

  • It doesn’t make you stronger

    It doesn’t make you stronger

    The belief that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is a lie.

    It may prepare us for greater trials and opportunities, but we also grow impatient or intolerant when we find ourselves facing the same issues repeatedly.

    Life feels fulfilling and purposeful when we solve a problem and move on, but feels exceedingly frustrating when we are compelled to deal with the same problem every day.

    Eventually, it’s not the repeated problem that gets to us but rather anyone associated with such problems.

    Like going to work and dealing with disrespect or unreasonable demands to constantly have to explain or defend yourself, and then getting home and being faced with similar experiences in a different context.

    Those themes that are similar between work and home is what feels like a trigger or a provocation because emotionally, it resonates with the insignificance that we feel in both places.

    And the same is true in reverse.

    What we experience in our home life preloads us for what we’re willing to tolerate in our public or professional life.

    The more mindful we are about this, the less likely we are to rage at those who have nothing to do with our misery. Be they loved ones, or strangers.

    Don’t go looking for character building experiences that will make you stronger.

    Life has plenty in store for you by design.

  • Who smiles first?

    Who smiles first?

    Are you perhaps the village idiot in someone else’s life, or maybe they’re filling that role in yours?

    The answer to the question as to who puts a smile on the face of the village idiot is that no one does.

    No one puts a smile on the face of the village idiot because no one notices the village idiot.

    But everyone is always willing to take a smile from them, or to be entertained by them.

    Who might that village idiot be?

    That village idiot is the care giver, the supporter, the ones who serve without recognition, or the ones who uplift without asking for anything in return.

    It’s the invisible ones that we expect things from, but don’t consider what they need from us.

    Sometimes we’re the village idiots in other people’s lives.

    But most often, we don’t recognise the village idiots in our lives because when we take people for granted, they become invisible or at the least, their contribution feels like our right or their duty.

    And when they no longer provide us with what we need from them, we don’t stop to consider why.

    If we do, we usually assume that they’ve changed, or that we’re no longer important to them.

    So, we simply move on and find a replacement.

    By making significant others invisible in their contribution to us, or only recognising it when we become invisible to them, we create the environment for depression, anxiety, abuse, and suicide, to name just a few common outcomes of feeling invisible.

    So, I ask you again, who puts a smile on the face of the village idiot?

    Remember : We only contribute towards a significant other when we believe that we matter to them.

    When we discover that we don’t, or that we weren’t as significant as we hoped to be, it tests our emotional resilience and our self-worth.

    How we respond to that test determines the difference between peace or pain.

  • Redirected rage

    Redirected rage

    Our self-worth defines our behaviour in moments when we feel most unappreciated.

    Whether a toddler, a teen, or an adult, we are provoked towards anger and bad behaviour when we feel taken for granted or irrelevant to those who matter to us.

    It doesn’t mean that they must treat us badly.

    It could be as simple as them not noticing what is important to us.

    How we need to feel appreciated is unique to each of us.

    Expecting others to know what’s important to us is how we test for significance without feeling vulnerable by expressing our needs.

    In other words, the moment we need to tell others what we need from them to feel significant, it no longer feels like significance to us. It feels like neediness.

    No one willingly seeks to express their needs without first trusting that it will not be used to weaken their position or standing with those around them.

    But trust is the last thing we can rely on when our self-worth is low, because if we don’t think we’re worth it, we have absolutely no reason to believe that anyone else thinks we’re worth it either.

    That’s how bad behaviour becomes the tool to distract attention away from how we feel about ourselves, while directing attention to what we think is a defendable gripe or anger that we have towards others, or towards life.

    It’s a vicious cycle that starts in childhood, but ends with you.

  • The demon child of ingratitude

    The demon child of ingratitude

    Disrespect only ever becomes an option when we disrespect ourselves.

    We don’t always disrespect ourselves because life is fluid, demanding different things from us at different times.

    In those moments when we are expected to be more than we believe we’re capable of, or when we are corrected for something that we do because we want it without consideration for its consequences on others or ourselves, or when we demand privileges without fulfilling our responsibilities – it is then that we lose our composure and respond in ways that undermine others.

    Disrespect is a form of anger and is a tool to achieve something without earning it.

    Others may experience it as arrogance or narcissistic behaviour, but at the core of it, it’s an insecurity spawned by ingratitude.

    Ingratitude sets in when we focus on everything that we want while diminishing the value of everything that we have.

    It’s at the heart of a vicious cycle that begins with the anger or hurt that we feel about an unfortunate or unpleasant life event, which stirs a rage within us that drives us to want to claim our dues from the world rather than earn it.

    Ingratitude fixates our gaze on risks and threats to our significance, rather than allowing us to focus on the opportunities that present themselves for us to achieve so much more than what we desire.

    Anger is the distraction that justifies disrespect, and disrespect is our perceived tool for justice that distracts us from our ingratitude.

    Few are willing to admit to being ungrateful.

    The rest are too busy justifying their bad behaviour because of how they were treated badly by others, while growing oblivious to how they become just like, if not worse, than those who treated them badly.

    Thus, the vicious cycle of harshness and ingratitude is maintained.

    It always starts with you.

    Do you respect yourself enough to be grateful for who you are and the life that you have?





  • Embrace your demons

    Embrace your demons

    Relationships fail when the demons of both don’t play nicely with each other.

    But demons are not so easy to recognise.

    What feels like a right or a legitimate expectation is often underpinned by a demon from the past when those rights were denied, or those expectations dismissed.

    Our innate need to be of significance to those we deem significant stir the demons within when that significance comes under threat.

    It gets ever more complicated when the demon is associated with what comes next, and not what is.

    Consider this.

    Those who play it safe in life are protecting themselves from failure or inadequacy.

    What they’re focused on may appear to be their absolute priority, and may even feel like it is their priority to them, without realising that what they’re focused on is to protect them from what it may lead to next.

    That’s how success becomes a threat, or emotional availability feels like intense vulnerability.

    The fear of abandonment means that we must protect ourselves from growing attached, or the fear of rejection means that we must preemptively reject before we’re rejected.

    Thus, self-sabotage leads to self-fulfilling prophecies that convince our demons that we were right to protect ourselves from a threat that no one else understands.

    That’s how our demons from the past ruin the promise of a beautiful future.

    If you don’t own your demons, your demons own you.

    It always starts with you.

  • Surviving sucks

    Surviving sucks

    I see too many people take pride in being a survivor, which in itself is not the biggest problem.

    The problem arises when that act of survival defines you for the rest of your life.

    When a traumatic event, or an abusive relationship, defines you beyond the immediate impact of experiencing it, you keep it relevant long after its occurrence.

    We surrender our lives to the efforts of survival when we lose sight of our ability to change our circumstances as we wait for change to arrive.

    What’s worse is that we don’t realise that those who are not showing up for us are likely in survival mode themselves.

    That’s how we do to others what has been done to us without realising that we’re part of that cycle.

    While we’re ‘surviving’ or waiting, those who have rights over us to show up for them as fully formed humans are denied the experience of feeling significant because we treat them as duty.

    But, more important than this, it’s not their ignored rights that is the greatest oppression.

    Taking for granted our ability to create ease and joy despite our backdrop of struggles is the worst oppression against ourselves.

    That’s the greatest loss of all.

    Nothing compares to the loss of opportunity to contribute towards the sweetness of life for yourself and for others.

    Not even death compares, because in death there is no life waiting to be lived.

    In death there is no need to create joy or to experience the wonderment of life.

    Yet so many yearn for death because of a tormenting moment from the past, while discarding their ability to create joy because of the horrors caused by troubled souls.

    That’s how we become equally troubled and repeat their mistakes in our own unique way while lamenting the burden of existence, forgetting that we gave up on life itself.

    Regret and sorrow has its place only as long as it spurs us into action, otherwise it ceases to be about what happened to us and becomes an indulgence of self-pity because we need our struggle to be appreciated.

  • Well intended bad methods

    Well intended bad methods

    Good intentions coupled with a bad method will result in bad outcomes.

    When that happens, fixating on our good intentions won’t make any difference to the consequences of our actions.

    The merit of what we do is always more important than the intention with which we do it.

    The moment we flip that around, we cause harm while abdicating responsibility for the impact of our uninformed decisions on those who had nothing to do with our choices.

    Sincerity and conviction come from wanting to achieve what we intended to achieve, rather than making excuses for why it wasn’t our fault when we fall short of our goal.

    That’s when self-pity overrides our accountability and we convince ourselves that it was not in our destiny to have achieved that goal.

    When we use destiny to explain our shortcomings, but accept praise for our successes, we lack conviction in who we are and what we stand for.

    Conviction comes from sincerity of belief in the value system that we claim to uphold.

    The moment that value system is open to compromise, we lose our bearings in life and become victims of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

    Conviction is impossible without self-worth.

    And self-worth is impossible when we lack accountability while living our lives for an audience.

    It always starts with you.

    Goals would be pointless if they could always be achieved on our first attempt.