Day 21: Am I Worthy?
“You don’t become what you want. You can have the greatest heart desire, and really work so hard, so hard, so hard. But if you don’t believe you are worthy, it will not come. That is the magic formula.”
When I was a little girl, my daddy told me I wasn’t good enough. You see, he experienced deep trauma from HIS childhood and hadn’t dealt with it before he got married and fathered four children.
I lived with the constant narrative that love is earned and can be taken away at a moment’s notice with the shift of a mood or one accidental misstep.
Once I became a teenager and saw how upset it made my father for me to be promiscuous and reckless and wild, I doubled down.
It I’m being honest, I probably forget more of my twenties than I remember. The only way I knew to live was at a full sprint.
It’s taken years and years of substance and pleasure misuse and more years of sober curiosity and exploration to realize it all comes down to this:
For so long, I didn’t believe I was worthy of a good life and I didn’t even know it.
Jamie Kern Lima says it this way too: “You don’t rise to the level of your dreams, you fall to the level of your worthiness.”
It won’t matter how much I meditate and read self help books and network and clean the house -- there will always be a hollowness if I don’t feel worthy.
I’ve heard before that the first half of your life is meant to deal with the traumas of childhood and the second half is to thrive and max out.
No matter how hard I believe that, I always feel behind.
I was 30 when I had my daughter.
I knew I couldn’t repeat the same cycle of psychological abuse inflicted by my father. I also still didn’t believe I was worth my own time, my own money, my own investment.
And then, as it always does, the alcohol got the best of me. I was depressed, I was unhealthy, I was in a toxic relationship, I was broke.
I don’t say this to claim that it was easy like a snap of the fingers. It’s been extremely difficult to stop drinking because it was the only way I knew how to feel whole, to feel funny, to feel vibrant, to feel sexy.
It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I haven’t done it yet. It’s only been 21 days since my last night of drinking, but I just know -- this has got to be it. There’s only so many chances you get to learn the same lesson, over and over and over.
Eventually, it’s just plain insanity to keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
Being a new sober adult is like learning a whole new language. I started drinking regularly when I was 16 years old!
It’s how I did everything.
But substance misuse + low self-worth = the perfect recipe for utter disaster.
It took a pattern interrupt to question my drinking. I almost typed that it took my daughter being born to know I wanted to question my relationship with alcohol, but it wasn’t.
If you know my story, you’ll know in April of 2018, I attended an immersive yoga training in the jungles of Costa Rica. Little did I know, but that was also the first month of my pregnancy with Luna.
However, I did not know until I returned to civilization and was able to take a pregnancy test… after the training.
This was truly the first transformative experience that I can remember. I still fondly keep in touch with other women I met at this training… it was like the best and most amazing group therapy where everyone contributes and heals and wants to be there.
Anyway, now I’m really rambling, but this turned out to be the longest I’d ever gone sober since 16. And I loved it. I felt like myself. I felt like I could dance and move and laugh and make jokes and that people liked me.
I wouldn’t have ever gone sober for this long had it not been essentially forced upon me (the training was ayurvedic inspired and alcohol free).
Up until this training, I hadn’t questioned my alcohol use.
I thought I needed it. I was relieved that no one ever tried to take it from me. I protected my alcohol use like I would something I was proud of, but instead it was slowly destroying me, numbing me to reality and stunting my healthy adult growth.
I’m going to go out on a limb here. I firmly believe that if you have a strong sense of identity and self-worth and self-love and basically a good, honest relationship with yourself, you won’t want to drink. At least, this is what’s true for me.
I drank because I felt less than. Or I felt like too much, and needed to drink to be more like everyone else.
I drank because I couldn’t comprehend the thought of being physically intimate and vulnerable with someone sober.
I drank because I didn’t believe I was capable of just being myself and that being enough.
And you know what? Simply abstaining from alcohol doesn’t all of a sudden grow your worthiness, self-love or self-belief.
Let me put it to you this way. People tell me all the time they got their real estate license. They act like it was hard and a huge hassle ect. And then I tell them, “hell, that’s the easy part.”
Not drinking is like getting your real estate license. All the inner work that comes after is the hard part.
And I’m in that hard part.
It’s tough to get vulnerable with myself and admit that I’ve hated myself for years, that I still bully myself with my dad’s voice in my head, and that the only person who can save me is me.
I think it took hearing Jamie Kern Lima talk to realize I’m still working on this area. It’s not a qualifications issue, it’s a worthiness issue.
I honestly don’t know the next step, I know how to sketch out a big plan and reverse engineer it into SMART goals, but shit, how do I convince my own self that I’m worthy?
I’ll have to write a part 2 to this because dang, I don’t have any answers. I guess I’ll see what my good friends GROK and chat-GPT have to say about building one’s self-worth.
Please! Comment below and if you do not subscribe to my monthly newsletter, sign up below. To be continued. Stay well out there and PEACE.
