Spoken Word: You Are Not Worthless

You are not worthless.

 

Maybe you think you never believed that about yourself, but chances are: you do.

We all learned it at some point.

If you are old enough to hear this, you’ve had more than enough time to learn that you are Worthless, at something.

That you are Not Smart Enough, Not Rich Enough, Not Attractive Enough – Not Good Enough for something. And in that moment of personal failure, you decided that you were worthless.

Of course you were wrong, but small emotions can’t see the big picture – they don’t span all of time, and they can’t fill all of space. Small emotions only fill the human-shaped piece of the universe that looks a lot like you.

You thought that you were worthless, because that’s what you assumed we all thought of you.

 

But you were not born Worthless.

It is something that you have been taught, when you learned to apply the eyes of society to yourself. It happened when you were first weighed in the balance, and found wanting.

I know because, in the beginning, someone else had to do the weighing for you. Maybe it was your parents, your friends, your school, or your religion. But some Judge sat and weighed you. Someone told you that you were Not Enough – they had to tell you, because you didn’t know.

And over time, you got very good at doing the weighing yourself. You preferred it, because you thought it hurt less to be your own Judge. Except that sometimes, it hurt more. But at least YOU were the one who cast the first stone and you prevented the awful moment of feeling judged by everyone else.

That was the only degree of control you thought you had.

 

Learning to judge yourself before others do it for you is something we all had to do. We call this “growing up”.

 

But you were not born Worthless.

And you are not worthless now.

And if the scale finds you wanting, I say something is wrong with the scale.

We’ve never seen anything like you, you see. We have no idea how to measure you.

 

So forgive us. Show us another way.

Make us another scale.

 

And show us what human Worth can look like, when it looks like you.