Worthy

At some point, many of us made a decision we didn't know we were making.

That our worth was something to be earned. That the right achievements, the right relationships, the right version of ourselves, presented consistently enough, would eventually add up to something. A feeling of finally being enough. Of having justified our place in the world.

And so we got to work.

We build things. Careers, reputations, families, lives that looked, from the outside at least, like evidence. We became good at things. Reliable. Capable. The person others could count on. We fill the days with doing because doing felt safer than the alternative.

The alternative being stillness. And in the stillness, the question.

Am I enough. Just as I am. Without any of it.

Most of us never stop long enough to ask it directly. Because somewhere underneath everything we're afraid of the answer.

I knew what my answer was. Because for a long time, I didn't feel I was enough.

As a baby I was adopted. One of the things adoption can do, even in the most loving of circumstances, is leave you with a distorted view of your own beginning.

For me it played out as a deep, quiet sense that I was an accident. That my arrival in the world was not something to be celebrated. That perhaps, at the most fundamental level, I shouldn't really be here at all.

I was raised in a wonderful, loving family. The love was real and it was constant and I am who I am in part because of it. And yet the wound remained. Because it lived somewhere that love alone couldn't reach.

I was taken to church as a boy. I remember sitting there one Sunday, listening to someone speak about a verse from Psalms. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. I wanted so much to believe that. I reached for it the way you reach for something just beyond your grasp.

Those words stayed with me and I created an image in my mind of my birth. The room full of anxiety and fear and impossible circumstances. But God and the angels were watching. Celebrating my arrival before I had done a single thing. Cheering for a life that was just beginning.

I held that image for years. I wanted so much to stand inside it.

But I couldn't. I could see the angels celebrating. I just couldn't join them.

I spent many years understanding and working through the issues around my adoption which culminated later, working in EMDR therapy. During one of those sessions something happened that I wasn't expecting.

The image came back.

The same room. The same birth. The same angels.

But this time something was different. This time I wasn't watching from a distance, reaching for something I couldn't quite hold. This time I was standing with those angels. Looking down at the miracle of a life beginning. My life. And I was cheering with them.

Not wishing I could celebrate it. Actually celebrating it.

I felt worthy of life itself. Not worthy because of anything I had done or proved or become. Worthy simply because I was here. Because life had been given to me. Because the first page of my story, the one I had spent decades believing was evidence of my unworthiness, was actually evidence of the opposite.

I was chuffed to be alive.

There were issues still to sort. Jobs on the list. Relationships to tend to. Stresses to manage. None of that had gone anywhere.

But underneath all of it, for the first time in my life I felt worthy of the life I was living. Not the achieved version of it. Not the performing, the proving, the earning. Just life itself. The simple, extraordinary fact of being here.

Maybe, like me, you have questioned your place in this world.

Not loudly. Not in a way you'd easily admit. But underneath everything, in the quiet moments, the question has been there. Do I really belong here. Am I actually enough. If people could see the real me, would they still choose to stay.

And so you learned to manage it. You became good at things. Achieved things. Built a version of yourself that worked well enough in the rooms you were in. Confident on the outside. Capable. Together.

But inside, a quieter story. One you rarely told anyone. The sense that the real you, the unedited, unperformed, unpolished version, was somehow not quite enough to show the world. So you kept it at arm's length.

That is what a worthiness wound does. It doesn't announce itself. It just quietly shapes everything. The relationships you keep at a distance. The opportunities you don't quite reach for. The version of yourself you never quite let anyone see.

I lived that for a long time. I know exactly what it costs.