“Self-worth.”
I first started getting more acquainted with this term when I started seeing a therapist. She told me that my worth as a human being doesn’t depend on my accomplishments or what I do. Self-worth is also not determined by your grades or how popular you are or how much money you make every year. This left me very perplexed. How else should we judge our value if not through our accomplishments, or our abilities and what we’re good at? Doesn’t all these determine how useful or how valuable we are as human beings?
So it took me quite a while to grasp this concept of self-worth. According to my therapist, your self-worth is just there. I guess Dr Christina Hibbert’s explanation of the term sums it up well (by the way, she’s not my therapist). She says that self-worth is “a deep knowing that I am of value, I am lovable, necessary to this life and of incomprehensible worth.” In short, it is the feeling that you are a good person who is deserving of love, kindness and respect no matter what you do or how much you’ve accomplished in life. You just know that you are inherently valuable.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t see ourselves this way. Instead, we measure our value or worth based on how good we are at our jobs or how much money we make or how likeable we are on social media. Like a lot of people, I used to attach my sense of self-worth to my job. To me, since my job took up a significant portion of my life, I used it as a measuring stick to determine if I’m good enough. I used to work at an advertising agency as a copywriter. Whenever my creative director applauded me for my work, I would feel happy and good about myself. However, when I found myself struggling to come up with the perfect tagline or getting negative feedback on my work, my self-confidence and self-esteem would plummet and I would feel defeated because I felt I didn’t measure up not only as a copywriter but as a person in general.
That’s how much I identified with my job and career as a writer. It dictated my self-worth, which obviously wasn’t very healthy. So much so that when I found myself without a job, especially during the pandemic, I went through an identity crisis. I asked myself who am I now that I’m not a writer, now that I am unemployed? I felt like I lost a huge part of myself. I no longer had a solid reason to get up every morning. So I became depressed and felt I had no purpose in life. It was during this time that I was forced to dig a little deeper when it came to my identity and worth as a human being. I started asking myself what I really wanted from life and what I was really passionate about.
It wasn’t easy. It involved finding a new purpose and a new reason to get up every morning. It was a whole new journey of self-discovery and getting reacquainted with myself. During this period which was about a year, I explored a number of part-time jobs from promoting essential oils to waitressing and customer service. I also took up painting classes to explore my interest in art. After trying out different things, I discovered that writing was still one of my greatest strengths and I particularly enjoy writing lifestyle and entertainment content.
So writing is still one of my major pursuits. But instead of attaching my self-worth and identity to my job as a writer, I learned to see the bigger picture. Now I know that my job does not dictate my worth as an individual. I am so much more than that, a complex human being with a variety of passions and talents, who is inherently worthy of love, respect and all the good life has to offer. In simpler terms, I am good enough just the way I am.
Random Rose is a content writer under Headliner by Newswav, a programme where content creators get to tell their unique stories through articles and at the same time monetize their content within the Newswav app.
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