Every Version of You, Matters.

One of the greatest benefits of being taunted and called names growing up is that I became callus to such things.  If I got called slow, or fat, or ugly, it wasn’t that it didn’t hurt, I just learned to not yield to the hurt.  As I’ve said so often, I learned to use pain to push my efforts in fitness, athletics, and academics.  I was driven to succeed.  When you are driven to succeed you hunt for results which means you are objective about the problem.  I was slow.  I was fat.  I was for damn sure intimidated by smaller classmates.  I had no problem admitting these things to myself because I saw that brutal honesty with self as the first step to begin solving these problems.

But most people know the ugly truth about themselves and they do everything to avoid it.  This is why phones can be such a vice for people. You can avoid being alone with your own thoughts 24/7.  What I was able to do and what I believe you can do as well, is separate your sense of self worth from the objective reality of what you are.  What you are specifically being those shortcomings that you truly desire to change.  What you are, is not what you are worth.  We value one another based on what we are all the time.  The kids in school only saw me as fat, unathletic, and timid, so they looked down on me and ridiculed me.  It was worse because I was always one of the biggest kids in my school and people felt I should be stronger and less cowardly.  But deep down I believed I was more than their interpretation of my physical appearance.  I knew I had done nothing to deserve the treatment I was getting and I thought it important to fight for my sense of self worth… fight to feed it and keep it alive despite the difficulties of my environment.

There were challenges at home.  My older sister physically and sexually abused me and my mother verbally berated me on a regular basis.  Again, no matter what they did or said, I knew I was a good kid and I hadn’t done anything to deserve this treatment.  Even as a little kid, it seems as though the fire of my experience forced me to ask deep questions and form deep narratives early in life:  

Do I Love myself?

Do I believe in myself?

Will I let their words dictate my actions?

One day I will be stronger because of these things.

Things were already hard, so to look at the truth of my chronic overeating, pornography use, timidity in the face of verbally aggressive people, etc. wasn’t that difficult.  Doing so gave me an accurate place from which to begin solving those problems.  Furthermore, a willingness to begin taking action is often a public declaration that we are trying to change something.  I distinctly remember running slowly up a hill near my high school and one of my classmates who would have called himself my friend, drove by in his old red pontiac and laughed out his window.  He must have thought, “He’s been fat as long as I’ve known him, why is he trying?”  The possibility of encountering scenarios like these often stifles many people’s actions even if they are willing to acknowledge the truth of their circumstances.  The risk of people seeing you toil in the infancy of your journey and potentially mock you for trying is too great for people to even think about, let alone endure.  So people sit still trying to ignore the truth and telling themselves a story that justifies a lack of action.

But, what would you do if your self worth truly came from you and not what people thought about you?  What would you do if you told yourself that the fire of unsolicited criticism of your efforts was simply a means to forge stronger character?  What if you told yourself that absorbing undeserved offense without the possibility of apology was developing your empathy and preparing you to be a true living example to others seeking light in their times of darkness?  

If people could internalize these ideas they could face themselves as they are and work towards what they want to be, with the understanding that every version of us is valuable.  In my experience, it was my most feeble version that actually needed to exist to create the evolving journey to my strongest version.  They’re all me and I love me.  You should love you.

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