You're Valuable, No Matter What

Consider The Panda 

Is it successful in relationships? Nope. 

Is it a useful and productive working animal? Nope. 

Does it sing in the mornings? Nope. 

It typically falls over, eats bamboo, and rolls down hills. That's pretty much it. But don't you love pandas? If you don't, plenty of people do. Think of your pet. If it's a dog it might fetch your slippers. If it's a cat, it probably looks for ways to make your days a little more complicated. If it's a parrot, it never shuts up. 

Realistically, do any of these animals have the skills to justify minimum wage? Unless they're sniffer dogs or performing cats, probably not. 

But are they valuable? Abso-freaking-lutely!

And so are you. 

Who Told You That You Needed To Earn Love?

Social media has become a reality TV show that never ends, where the voting is 24/7 and your value is based on vanity metrics. The owners of the networks pay you for keeping people on their apps the longest. Statistically, people are more likely to interact with things they dislike than things they like. It's called the "confrontation effect". It's also why social networks have largely gone out of their way to avoid having a dislike button. Because it forces you to like things or to comment. That means the majority of comments are negative, which further exacerbates the confrontation effect. 

If you've grown up online, and algorithms raised you, then social media told you that you need to earn love. You going to let Elon or Zuck tell you how loveable you are? It doesn't seem wise. 

Here's what I know about you. You try. You're reading a blog right now. That takes a degree of concentration and commitment that few people still possess. But you're doing it, because you want to understand yourself better. And you should understand yourself better. Because so much of what you believe about yourself is based on things strangers online told you. And the rest comes from whatever patterns your family picked up from their family, good and bad. People pass down patterns like collections of dusty trinkets. They fill the shelves of your psyche until you lose yourself among meaningless traditions. You think these nicknacks are so important, but actually the whole thing started 5 generations ago when your ancestor threw a beer flagon through a window and bought a tacky trinket to get back in his wife's good books. She hated it, and every time she looked at it, it reminded her of his rage. But her son didn't know the story, so he started buying them for her and she passed them on to him. He added to the collection, and passed it on to his daughter. She added to the collection, and so on. Now you are faced with protecting this proud collection of material objects that arose from your many times great grandfather being a rage-filled asshat. 

The same thing happens with personality traits.  

She had to work so hard for his love that she drummed into her daughter that she must do the same. He was so infuriated by things not being exactly as he wanted them that he took it out on his son, and so on, and so on. Before you know where you are, there are shelves of tat and endless amounts of inherited trauma. And biology being the wonderfully efficient thing it is, when these patterns persist over time they get hard-coded, so you can inherit not only the shelf-filling trinkets but also the complete lack of emotional regulation, codependency, and need to earn love. Good times! 

It's Never The Wrong Time to Spring Clean

I'm writing this post during the spring, but whenever you find it is the moment to act on it. If you're carrying around bags of BS you plan to hand to the next generation in the name of tradition, put it down. Look a little more closely at what you're passing to others, whether family or friends. Has feeling the need to prove yourself worthy of love been a gift to you? Probably not. So why would you pass that to anyone else? You can drop it right now if you want. 

The panda serves no particularly great purpose. But it's worthy of love. 

So are you. 

A golden retriever isn't going to win any IQ tests, but it's worthy of respect. 

Share this with someone who needs to read it. 

Keep your chin up,

Rebecca

P.S. Grab a free gift or two before you go, because you're worth it.