To know your worth, know what you are not willing to accept because what you are not willing to accept will show everyone, eventually, what YOU are worth.

Before the mirror experience, I’d been hospitalised for more than a week when I was afflicted suddenly one morning by excruciating abdominal pain. It happened one morning (yes, again on a morning!). I’d gotten up, only to collapse suddenly at the foot of my bed. For the next forty-five minutes, I was there alone, on the cold floor in the middle of a full-blown winter, writhing in agony as mind-numbing pains pulled and tucked at my adnominal region. Eventually, after passing in and out of consciousness, I had managed to call the emergency medics. I was catered off on a stretcher almost an hour since the ordeal began. Despite all tests, none of the physicians who attended to me could determine what the matter was. What helped me through it all was the thought of my children. What would become of them if I died? That thought was to clang over and over in my head throughout the ten days I was hospitalised. It was in that hospital room, on my hospital bed, that I made up my mind to let go of everything that was causing me so much suffering, everything that was threatening to shorten my life span. The mirror experience happened around about the same time.

To know your worth, know what you are not willing to accept because what you are not willing to take will show everyone eventually what YOU are worth.

One of the lasting effects of being told for years that you are not good enough is always this need to be less than. We strive to be less than we can fit the box others have determined we are good enough to hold. We believe that being ‘less than’ will make us more likeable or that staying within the assigned box will make those who don’t love us love us. In the process, we tend to lose our authentic self to make room for the self others have programmed for us.

For a long time, this was exactly me. I wanted to be happy. I told myself that I deserved to be happy. But it turned out I was paying lip service to those words because I had a minimal idea who the ‘I’ in the ‘I want’ really was.