Self Worth and Your Work
Self worth comes from your own self love, acceptance, and awareness and understanding. Oftentimes we place our self worth on our work, jobs, and careers. Your worth comes from what you’re proud of yourself for, what you enjoy and what you enjoy to work and excel in. Recently I found that I thought I was doing that, only to find that I was actually basing my worth on how my job responds to this work.
On the healthy side of finding self worth in my work, I reaffirm it to myself sometimes by thinking, “Look at what you’ve done, look at what you’re doing.” But for the past couple years or so, and well throughout my ADHD life, there have been people around me who would tell me what I’ve done is not enough, or they just don’t even care that I did this work. But talking with others outside of this bubble of unsupportive people, I found that: No, I am doing a lot and I’m doing a lot of good. I am asked to speak at STEM conferences and lead teams. I am good at what I do and just because a few people in this bubble can’t see that doesn’t make that untrue.
I have always been one to overwork myself. I grew up playing 3 sports year-round with a fourth one thrown in there for fun for the summers while also being in too many clubs to count and too many honors classes while also navigating my ADHD with it all. So it was to no surprise that once I entered the career world, I would voluntarily get to work an hour early to get a head start — and then stay an hour or two late to do some extra work before going home and working on another project for a different job or passion.
When we all went remote March 2020, it became easier to work more because I didn’t have a train or bus commute in my way. Only a few recognized it and acknowledged what I was doing. When I announced I was leaving, I thought I would receive messaging from my peers about it. But no, most people never noticed, and I was crushed. I thought of most of those people as friends, and they didn’t even see me as a colleague.
What I’ve learned from this overworking and placing personal value in the quality of work is that you can produce any quality of work, and you might be the only one who cares or values it. I used to be embarrassed by how much work I did for previous jobs —like, come on, you really thought doing some extra work would make you friends on top of doing your job well? Girl.
I no longer am measuring my worth over how others perceive my own work beyond quality, relevance, and user/business needs. We’re all still humans at the end of the day, and I try to remind myself that everyday.
