Dearest reader, let’s talk seeking validation

So let’s talk seeking validation.

If you've read the last article I posted, then you know that my life in high school was a mess. I had the loudest, meanest most vicious saboteur... Which was feasting and feeding in my security to just make my self esteem worse, and as my self esteem went down further and further, so went my mental health .

I don't know it then, but I was definitely depressed in high school. And the worst part was not knowing that the things my shame was saying about me weren't true... So I was a sad fearful tortured soul inside , posing as a strong and focused girl at Alliance Girls high school because that's what people in such suchools were supposed to be right? Focused, sure of themselves, using their talents, outgoing , well spoken ... I may have been some of those things but I wish I knew then that I could be vulnerable and that's okay. I was always trying to be strong and to appear strong and unbothered by anything ... But in truth I was anything but unbothered.

Anyway, having a low self esteem, as you may know if you have struggled with it, means that inside you do not feel worthy of whatever... It could be yoy feel you're not smart enough so you need someone to say you are smart so you can believe it . You'll feel you're not beautiful so you need someone to say you are beautiful for you see it and may be start believing it. You feel you're not good at anything so you need people to point out what you're good at to believe you're actually good at it.

Low self esteem means may be you don't feel confident so you need someone to say "you're always so confident" to believe that you're actually confident.

When I look at my own struggle with shame and low self esteem, I see how I've been living thinking and believing that I was ugly , that my body wasn't right, and I always wanted constant affirmation to feel and believe that I was okay.

So when validation didn't come, I felt I was nothing.

Oftentimes, people struggling with low self-esteem are likely to be involved in doing so many things. Most times they won't know, but they are in all those many activities so that they can do well, so that when they do well someone who they trust will say they did well, so they can feel good about themselves. It's sad but true, if you're a person doing like a million things I'd encourage you to examine if you need to be involved in all that, or if you're in those activities hoping they will make you the something you feel you're not, or if you're doing it expecting affirmation so you can feel complete.

I have personally been looking for validation almost all my life, I just didn’t know that’s what it was. At primary school level, our teachers were always saying " good job" or "be like Risper" almost all the time, so I didn’t have to struggle with my self esteem then. I thought I was actually very okay.

Come high school, we are many smart and brilliant students, each being the best from whichever place they came from. So "being the best" did not matter anymore, you had to be better than everyone else to standout. May be I could have stood out even among all these other brilliant girls at Alliance Girls, but the problem with having a low self-esteem is that it affects your performance even at things you're really good at, and you may start believing you're not good at them or at anything anymore... But in truth it's just that your mental state is not favourable to anything, even at something as easy as doing well in school for me , became a hard task because half the time I was trying to get my mind to come down so I could focus and study.

Anyway, so being at Alliance Girls, and not having someone to affirm me all the time set me on a path to hiding and looking for validation. Hiding as in escapism in novels and more novels so may be I could lose myself in someone else's fictional happy world and not be alive to my misery; and looking for validation as in trying to perform well so my teachers could validate me.

Well, you can't be in escapism and productivity at the same time, so the more I read more novels to escape from my mental disarray, the worse my performance got, and the less affirming I got, and the worse my self esteem got, and the worse my mental health got, and the worse my withdrawal from things got... By the time I was in form two second term I couldn't stay commited to anything, I dropped out of every club I was in. I literally missed poetry club music festivals reading a novel, and yet even as I missed practice to read a novel I was hating myself, and then when the club succeeded to national levels I was in shame, regret and the whole cycle of guilt shame regret low self-esteem and feeling like and believing I was a failure in everything just got worse.

You see, as you may have noted, my shame, as shame works in all of us, used to gauge my success as versus other people. So in essence, I had to be better than someone else to be good, and someone else had to be worse than me for me to feel complete. I bet you have been caught up in looking for your worth through comparison. After all eve in school we had to compete for every thing, so your being good or bad was always relative to someone else. It is sad and unfortunate that that's how we were introduced to viewing the world, that we were only worthy at the expense of some one else being less worthy.

The fact my shame, which is the primary voice that ran my life throughout highschool and my early twenties... The fact that this distorted voice of shame ran my life and used comparison to decide if I was worthy or not meant that this shame had decided what the standard of good was. It's why it could tell me to be good and worthy I needed to have a clear skin, I needed slightly larger boobs than I have, I needed to be from a rich home, I needed to have been knowing how to swim before I joined Alliance Girls , and the color of my skin needed to be consistent throughout my entire body, so I could be worthy. Worthy of what or for who my shame never said, so I was forever working with a moving target, and so I was never enough ... Because when my skin behaved and my acne went down a bit, my shame required I should have already been connected enough to have been knowing someone from Alliance Boys even before I joined Alliance Girls to be enough, the way the girls my shame said I had to measure up to to be worthy enough for my shame did.

The truth is that to date I have acne. I am turning 25 later this year, and I have a feeling this acne won't be going anywhere. So if I were to be working with the standards my shame had for me back then, I would be unworthy today, and so not deserving of feeling good because I do not measure up to the standards of this shame. I am still a fairly short girl with a small body so my shame would still say I don't have the perfect size of boobs to measure up to the standards of what it considers worthy. I am a black woman with varying shades of skin across my body so my shame would still say because my ass is not as light skinned as my face then I am not worthy.

And yes I’ve talked about my ass... But isnt that the case for most black people? I may have talked about my ass, but it’s just a metaphor for how many things shame could be using as a tool to point out our shortcomings. I’ve seen men worrying about receding hairlines, and pretty girls with a healthy tummy hating their "kitambi", and seem people being afraid to smile because they have colored teeth, and seen people afraid to show up in public because they don’t have "swag" clothes and shoes...

Because with shame you will never be enough. Shame will always demand perfection just for you to stand a chance at barely being acceptable, not to mention that with shame you will always be required to be extra ordinary just to fit in as ordinary.

So you see, even relying on validation to feel good about yourself will never be enough because people can validate your performance in places like school or work or comment on how well you sing or smell or dress or smile, but people cannot affirm and validate everything about you. So even if you got the perfect validators, if your shame is running your life you'll still fall short because someone validating you on your presentation skills will not remedy the purpoted imperfection of your crooked toe nails that shame uses to say you're bnly enough. Someone validating you on your public speaking skills will not fix your extra small or extra large ass, boobs, manhood or whatever flaws your shame talks about in secret that people cannot fix by validating you.

See shame will always have a list of things it says you need to be to be enough for it, and the truth is that you are as you are, there are somethings about you you cannot change. And so if your shame uses natural things like acne, boob size, skin colour, body size etc like it has used with me, it is basically saying that you are forever condemned to having a low self esteem and being unworthy. That is what shame does. It will use things you're probably not even capable of changing as your imperfection that "makes you less" so you can never ever win, not even if you achieve the highest levels of things you're capable of doing.

What things does your shame say are imperfect about you to beat you down and to steal your joy ?

Anyways, validation? Validation and being affirmed cannot fix anyone's low self-esteem. And by validation I mean even from activities, not purpose, not significance, not positions of authority, not people, not our lovers or friends can ever fix a gap of worthiness in us.

We need to understand first that nothing we can do can make us worthy... Because shame lies to us that worth is this rare and external thing we do not possess that we have to work for to get, to earn.

To paraphrase Dr. Kelly Flanagan in his book "Loveable" ... Shame lies to us that by participating in something significant we may become significant in the process. And may be that's why even senior people in their sixties are in a thousand committees jobs and projects just so they can feel significant, because even at that age the target is still moving, you can never win with shame.

What I want to share with you my dearest love is something I read in the book "Loveable" that I've quoted above... Do not be afraid of admitting that you have shame or be ashmed of probably having shame. Shame is not rare or distant or only applicable to people like me who are "messed up". I can assure you you have your own shame, and one of the best things I'm learning by embracing knowing shame is that it is becoming less and less powerful in life. The quote from the book is

"Shame is simply the belief we are not enough. It is the core conviction that we are without sufficient value —that we have somehow fallen short of this thing called worthiness. This belief then takes many forms, including thoughts and feelings, and it is most palpable as a haunting whisper issuing from the shadowy corners of our mind, telling us life is a test that we’re failing and a competition that we’re losing. Usually, the whisper has been there so long, we don’t experience it as a deceptive intruder distorting our reality. Instead, we experience it as our trusted narrator—the familiar voice in our head, telling us the truth about who we are. So, when it tells us we are less than enough, we believe it."

I couldn't have said those words better. We believe it, so when shame says we can only find worthiness outside of ourselves we believe it.

And so we have a society of addicts, addicts of validation, addicts of busyness, addicts of drugs yes, addicts of literally whatever we can get our hands on that makes us feel good about ourselves because shame has said the worthiness we seek can only come from external sources.

I'd like to encourage you today that you are the one who's worthy. Nothing you are currently looking for, have looked for or plan to look for in future will ever make you feel worthy or complete.

No level of validation will ever complete any of us. Never.

But we can do the work of starting to see that we are the ones who are "cool" and make things "cool" ... It's not the "cool" things we think we should do to make us "cool" that will make us as such.

I basically mean that worthiness, as I am learning, is the most abundant resource in the planet( haha stolen from Dr. Flanagan's book).

We don't need to look for worthiness outside, by seeking validation or whatever, because we are already worthy. You are enough. Just by being you. Not you the student, not you the mother, not you the girlfriend or boyfriend, not you the intelligent coder (worker), not you the teacher or whatever your profession ... And you are not unworthy because you are may be an addict of alcohol or weed or whatever drugs. You are not unworthy because you haven't been doing well in school or at work. You are not unworthy because you are unemployed or have a 'small' nongrand job. You are not unworthy because you dropped out of school. You are not unworthy because you had an abortion. You are not unworthy because have been dumped. You are not unworthy because you've never dated anyone. You are not unworthy because you're a Virgin, neither are you unworthy because you have had sex with tens of people. You are not unworthy because you have attempted suicide, and neither are you worthy because you have been "doing everything right".

You are worthy just by being alive. YOU DO NOT NEED TO BE ANYTHING OR NOT BE SOMETHINGS TO BE WORTHY.

You do not need to EARN your worthiness. So you don't need validation from anything or anyone to be enough.

Just by being alive, you are worthy. I repeat, you do not need to be or not be anything to EARN or deserve Worthiness.

So today invite you to my side, to come journey with me as we intentionally identify when our shame rears its head and attempts to our lives and say we aren't enough because....

You are worthy. You don’t need to earn it. You don’t need to be validated. But if it’s any consolation if you really need validation, I validate you. I affirm you. I state facts. I call you worthy.