The Value of You
It’s never too late to realise you matter.
So, I’ve been thinking. Why is it a bad thing to be okay with yourself? Why is paying any attention to yourself looked down upon? Why are we stuck in a world where humility is appreciated more than looking after yourself? Why are we expected to do anything and everything for others but the moment we need to look after ourselves it falls into the ‘mental health’ space instead of the ‘just living my life and staying alive’ space? It’s probably something to do with the generally reserved British culture, but that needs to change. We shouldn’t need tireless mental health practitioners to teach us well into adulthood what looking after yourself actually means. There shouldn’t be a whole industry devoted to mindfulness, but there is. That’s where we are. We’re conditioned to look down on ourselves.
I see it everywhere. People choose to be self deprecating when owing up to a mistake , or anything small. Anything potentially negative. I had a colleague call themselves clumsy in relation to something minor like it was a defining attribute of themselves, as opposed to accepting that it was a simple action that has no bearing on their character. This colleague of mine is one of the nicest, most genuine and kindest people I’ve met, but they have a habit of focussing on the minor more negatives that they think they can attribute to their personality and they reiterate that. They’re absolute ace, I can’t begin to highlight how much of a joy it is to even know this person. To call them God’s gift to humanity wouldn’t be inaccurate. They reiterate the negativity they come out with like they are not important but actually, they’re the lead actress in the show that is their life. That matters. I’m a big believer in speaking things into being. If you keep telling other people that you are clumsy or silly, people will believe that. They will treat you like that. Then, you’ll start believing it too. Then, all of a sudden that throwaway comment that you said to diffuse an awkward situation or in response to a well-deserved compliment, that becomes truth. And, that sucks.
What happens when instead, you start being positive about yourself? You start looking for the great things about yourself? There are no huge consequences, a building isn’t going to fall down if you say something nice about yourself. I like to anoint myself the Queen of Awesome. I do it so much it got mentioned in my wedding speeches. I used to say, “If I don’t say it, who will?”. Now they’re all saying it.
When I started announcing my awesome to the world, I was a lone voice. I barely believed it, but now — I know that I am pretty fantastic, and I’m okay with saying that. I worked hard to get there, despite what Beyoncé says you don’t just wake up flawless. I’m okay with being nice to myself now, because with the long term depression I deal with I’ve spent a lot of time being pretty nasty. It’s very easy to let one negative thought infect your whole perception of yourself. For me, that thought was pretty deep. It was my end-of-inception-movie-spinning-top. It was the niggling belief that, fundamentally, I wasn’t good enough to be alive.
It affected everything. Every thought pattern I had could be traced back to this. I behaved like I didn’t matter, but other people did. I never questioned why I felt this way, and the paradox within that. I never realised that by virtue of existing alone, I deserved to be here. Morality plays a huge part in our perception, and whether things are good or bad matter to most of us. Sometimes, we think we have to be good to deserve the things we have but life itself is a very neutral existence. You don’t do anything to deserve being born, it just happens to you and you’re stuck with it until you die.
Sometimes, on a very personal level it’s hard to accept that actually, you matter. We are taught to value other people above the self and that can be right, but we’re not taught to look out for the warning signs when you’re taking it too far and you stop protecting yourself, treating yourself, being kind to yourself so that you can do those things for other people. Recognising your needs and acting on them is okay. Especially when there is a conflicting need, or you feel like you need to be there for someone else. There are seven billion people in the world, the chances are someone else can do it and you can look after yourself instead. You’re allowed to do it.
I’ve had a lot of difficultly recognising that more often than not, I’m putting others above myself to maintain commitments when what I actually need is to go to bed, rest, or recuperate. Acting above and beyond for others is held so highly, so widely praised but actually no-one cares what the impact of these actions have on you. No-one takes the time to think about the impact on you. Doing things for other people can mean that you don’t look after yourself. It’s actually quite hard to achieve a healthy balance when we’re surrounded by the messages of morality, saying that altruistic behaviour is the desirable human attribute; the symbol of a good human being. The failure to do good when one has the opportunity is something that causes guilt, because we’re taught not doing good is bad, but we’re not taught to investigate these feelings, the context or the situation. If you have the opportunity to do good, you should, right? Because, if you don’t — somehow, you’re a bad person and that means…
…who knows what that means? My thoughts never really got that far. All I know now is that this prioritising others before myself got me to a place where I ended up damaging my mental health, exhausting myself doing things I didn’t want to because others asked me to. It’s not a popular viewpoint and it’s a bit taboo to say, but f*** everyone else. Why do I say this? Because when I die of exhaustion, they’ll still carry on living their lives. When my eyes close for the last time, that’s it for me. Then, what will I become? At best maybe they’ll put up a statue in my name, an icon on my grave: here lies Hannah-Rebecca, she lived doing lots of things for everyone else and died the same way.
Wonderful, I’ll be sure to enjoy that in my grave whilst the moss grows on my statue, my relevance fades and the etched words grey away. I’ll take great comfort in those words when a pigeon uses my effigy as a bathroom.
Or, I can do something else. I can be, something else. I can be nice to myself, I can enjoy the time I have alive and I can appreciate that irrespective of the validation of others, I can be content. I can recognise that I matter. If not to anyone else, then at least to myself. I can buy myself blue roses because they’re my favourite flower. I can watch rubbish TV and feel okay about not volunteering every spare hour that God has given me, and I can use some of my time on myself.
You can’t look after anyone else until you look after yourself. It’s okay to be good to yourself. It’s okay to treat yourself well. It’s okay to say nice things about yourself. It’s okay to say, “thank you” to a compliment instead of dismissing it. Someone probably needs to hear that.
It’s okay.
