5 weekly readings — self-worth
readings from Joyful Sarcasm, Hannah Cao, Sophie, Swamp Ruby, and Paisley
Lately I’ve been struggling with my self-worth. I’ve been having a hard time forgiving myself. I’ve been all twisted up wishing I’d done things differently, wondering how it’s possible I’ve made some of the decisions I’ve made.
How is it possible I positioned myself with so much student debt? How is it possible I’ve spent so much of my life hiding my art? How is it possible I’ve spent so much of my adulthood accepting how others define me?
This should be a time of excitement for me: I’m at the beginning of a new life again. But that also means there’s ruins from the old life all around me. And not everything I tore down, intentionally or accidentally, was bad; some of it was good.
Meanwhile I’m having to start everything in my life up from zero at once: get apartment (check), furnish apartment (check), get car (almost check), get job (ongoing). Every day I wake up to the overwhelming list of what I must do and haven’t done — this list serves at times as a barometer of my self-worth. And no matter how much progress I make any given day, it doesn’t feel like enough.
Joyful Sarcasm
So I loved this piece by
. It was so helpful to read this post and remember that I am evolving, growing, learning. It’s not reasonable for me to be hard on myself now as a 37-year-old for decisions I made about student debt as 22-year-old, and it’s not reasonable for me to expect myself to have a “perfect, clean slate.”I can’t have a clean slate! However much I might be restarting my life, there’s a lot from the prior life that’s coming with me — much of it good (my son) and much of it messy (my student debt and the sense that I fucked up my whole “career”). I haven’t had a professional role since the summer of 2021, and so even my career itself is at a new beginning: I’m as un-linear in my life as they come.
’s piece helped me remember to forgive myself.Not broken, just evolving
:“The thing about people is that we don’t follow neat little lines. Thoughts aren’t linear. Feelings aren’t linear. Decisions sure as hell aren’t linear. Some days, you wake up feeling like a completely different person than you did yesterday. One minute, you’re certain about something, and the next, you’ve changed your mind entirely. We evolve, we grow, we learn—and sometimes, we do all those things in fits and starts. So, it baffles me that we expect anyone, including ourselves, to have all the answers right now, to fit neatly into a box, or to have a perfect, clean slate. The truth is, we’re all just figuring it out. And that’s okay.
I meet people who’ve made unwise choices and bad decisions, but what I also meet is their humanity. I see them for who they are in this moment—someone who has the right to change their mind, to change their path, to take another shot at doing better. It doesn’t matter what they’ve done or what they didn’t do. What matters is who they are now and who they could become.”
Hannah Cao
I felt the first paragraph in this extract from
so hard: I’ve spent so much of my life worrying “about whether I’m understood, feeling like the world is collapsing when I realise I’m being wildly misunderstood.”I’ve done so much work to access me true authentic self in the last year, but I’ve also been socially isolated: what happens when I’m back in crowds of people, trying to be social and make friends? Will I just have the same struggles as before?
So far, since coming out as non-binary, I have been much more successful at social interaction: I just feel more like me! And I just care less what others think. But even so, I haven’t been able yet to build a social life in my new town (to do list continues).
I want what Hannah wants in this extract: I want to stop “bending to fit the expectations of others, and learn to stand firm in who I am.”
I’ll stand firm in who I am and make friends with the right people.
“Shut up! you’re the only one that knows you”
:“I spent so much time looking for validation, worrying about whether I’m understood, feeling like the world is collapsing when I realise I’m being wildly misunderstood. I’m always fighting to prove my worth to people who I find out might never see me clearly, because they can’t or they simply decided that they won’t.
The thing is that it’s exhausting. I want to stop bending to fit the expectations of others, and learn to stand firm in who I am. That’s what self respect is to me: it’s the difference between living authentically and constantly shapeshifting to make others comfortable or feel better.
I wouldn’t say that it’s arrogance; it’s not thinking that I’m better than others or refusing to take advice when I seek it. It’s about knowing my boundaries and recognising when my worth is respected, and not shrinking myself for the sake of approval.
Almost my whole life I’ve allowed other people’s opinions to carry more weight than my own truth. The unfair feeling of it all is making me want to break out of this.”
Sophie
In The Belle Letters, I encountered this piece by Sophie that helped me remember again (I always need to remember this over and over) that I am not “too old.”
There are so many examples in our media of people who have everything together in an adventurous and satisfying lifestyle and I thought these points about Sex and the City were salient.
When I judge myself against that benchmark, what conclusion am I going to come to?
Sophie critiques this outlook and includes two paragraphs at the end of this extract which I really needed to read: 30 and 40 are still so young.
You’re Only in Season 1 Of Your Life
:“Despite not being a Sex and the City fan, the show was huge when I was a kid in the early 2000s. Back then, it was playing out in real time, and people would discuss the latest musings of the fabulous four. From what I gathered through the cultural osmosis of gossip magazines and TV chatter, the SATC ladies were all highly successful women. They lived in New York City, wore designer fashion, thrived in their careers, and had whirlwind romances—some of which lasted, and some of which didn’t. At my tender young age, their lives seemed so wildly different from mine that they might as well have been from another planet. They felt grown—older and wiser than I could even fathom.
And then, recently, I saw a quote that said Carrie Bradshaw was only 32 in season one of the show.
As someone who just turned 31, this piece of information gave me so much comfort.
More often than not, we forget that so many of the shows, books, and films we love actually feature protagonists who are on the good side of 30. Yes, plenty of media focuses on teenage characters played by mid-20s actors, or 20-somethings navigating chaotic love lives (like just about every reality dating show ever).
Then there’s this relentless media narrative that once you pass a certain age, you’re over the hill. Ballerinas often retire at 30. Some footballers do too. Models are considered past their prime at 25—a youthful face is the currency, and the world is obsessed with it. Leonardo DiCaprio practically hands out breakups as 27th birthday gifts. No wonder we feel the pressure creeping in as we approach 30 or 40, as if we’re standing on the edge of a cliff rather than at the start of something exciting and new. So while I know 31 is still extremely young and I’m not being dramatic, but knowing that a 32-year-old woman was just beginning her journey in one of the most iconic shows of the 21st century? Well, that’s reassuring.”
….
“When you’re young, being in your 30s seems extraordinarily grown-up. You imagine your life at 30, 35, 40—maybe there’s a house, a thriving career, a family, money in the bank, a nice car in the driveway. And then, when you actually reach those ages and your reality doesn’t quite match that vision, it’s easy to feel like you’re behind. Like you’ve failed in some way. And when you see people younger than you seemingly “having it all together,” that feeling only intensifies.
And yet, 30 and 40 are still so young. There is so much life ahead. But the milestones society expects—six-figure salaries, perfect relationships, a mortgage, children, career success—are laid out like a checklist we’re meant to complete before an invisible buzzer sounds. That pressure is even heavier for women. With the ever-present ticking clock above our heads, 30 comes with a lot of feelings, even when you do still feel 21 mentally. Likewise, if you don’t have what’s expected of you by then, the worry multiplies tenfold.”
Swamp Ruby
Confession: I’m obsessed with everything I read by
.And I especially liked this piece! Swamp Ruby describes the experience of “failure” — a time she performed a song “shockingly bad” — and ultimately getting over it. I love how she describes her train of thought after overcoming that moment of failure to sing again and returning to the theater where the “bad performance” occurred: “Instead of my mental flashback to the last time I was there reigniting the shame that was horrible enough to induce a whole new phobia, I remembered the feeling and thought to myself god I was shite at that song, really shite, absolutely dire, honestly should probably have been sacked. And then I stopped thinking about it, enjoyed my friend’s show, and launched myself into a big pile of bubble wrap.”
I’ve had a lot of moments of failure in the past several months, whether personal or otherwise, and I’m going to need to have the same ability to shake memories off.
How I stopped singing (then started singing again (but only once))
:“The show began with me walking onstage singing into a microphone. In the context of the show, I was to think I was performing this song phenomenally well. In the context of reality, I was performing it shockingly badly. The song was Whitney Houston’s One Moment in Time. Before typing that last sentence, I had to sit in silence for probably about three minutes trying to remember what song it was—that’s how successfully I blocked out this memory.
Not to blow my own trumpet too enthusiastically, but I’m not the worst singer in the world. I’m also not the best singer in the world, but I can sing well enough to get jobs on the basis of that ability. Over the course of my (admittedly short) public performance era, I only encountered two songs that I just could not make sound anything close to acceptable.1 One was The Bangles’ Eternal Flame, and the other was One Moment in Time. The best I can explain it is that there is just something about the tone of my voice that doesn’t suit the sort-of-gentle-but-not-quite verses of these particular songs, and instead sounds just, like, so bad.
What I would do with OMIT was muddle through the verses putting on half an American accent (hoping that was an improvement) and try to make the audience forget the verses entirely by going increasingly all in on each chorus. So for the last minute or so of the song, I would just be belting my absolute pan in.
I’ve just looked it up and OMIT is almost five minutes long. It was a solo. Honestly, to muscle through that level of cringe every day for a whole rehearsal period and then a whole show run—that was quite a feat, good for me.”
…..
“Then suddenly I was standing at the side of the stage. Downing pints of water and shaking like fuck, but standing there nonetheless. And then it was time to walk onstage so I couldn’t pull out even if I wanted to. And then I was standing on the stage in front of an audience and I probably sounded a bit shaky and nervous to start, but then I didn’t. And it was fine. And people clapped. And I walked off the stage. And people said well done. And I had so much adrenaline going on I could probably have pulled the theatre out of its foundations and then fought every member of the cast, crew and audience. But instead I sat backstage and listened to the rest of the show. And everyone was great and we all celebrated.
So for me to return to the theatre of my terrible awful dreadful performance from five years ago only a couple of days after ‘conquering’6 the fear that it brought on felt quite serendipitous. Instead of my mental flashback to the last time I was there reigniting the shame that was horrible enough to induce a whole new phobia, I remembered the feeling and thought to myself god I was shite at that song, really shite, absolutely dire, honestly should probably have been sacked. And then I stopped thinking about it, enjoyed my friend’s show, and launched myself into a big pile of bubble wrap.”
Paisley
makes me realize the source of many of my troubles: loneliness. Recently I’m completely alone pretty much every day. I have lots of friends and I call them sometimes, but very few of them live near me. Which means my life has taken on the same characteristics as my life had for a long time in Brooklyn: loneliness, isolation, unemployment.
So I am lonely pretty much all the time, to be honest.
But I know that this mesh of loneliness around me causes me to see reality in a distorted way. My loneliness does everything Paisley describes loneliness as doing — causes me to read too deeply, causes me to overlook, causes me to think I don’t deserve “companionship that feels good or true.”
It’s a grim extract, but I think the personification of loneliness is a good reminder: loneliness is a liar. And I’m hoping my current loneliness is temporary.
Loneliness
:“Loneliness is a liar.
Loneliness will cause you to read too deeply into things, overlook other things, and sabotage both.
Loneliness will tell you that you aren’t deserving of companionship that feels good and true, or new experiences that replenish and broaden, or familiar experiences that do the same.
Loneliness will bargain with you, convincing you to settle in situations that don’t serve you. The tradeoff? A willful recipient of breadcrumbing.
Loneliness will force you to choose between the person you know yourself to be freely and naturally and the person you must be to achieve and possess—because who you are already isn’t good enough.”
thank you for the lovely words, I’m sorry to hear you’ve been having such a hard time ❤️
thanks so much for sharing 🫂 you can be so proud of yourself. growth is always x