Self Worth

@Gettingbettertoday how about a leap of reason? It’s not unreasonable to decide that your being has value. You are alive. Your being is engineered to survive. An eagle is engineered to survive. Do you have any less value than an eagle? Presumably an eagle has less mental clutter (evaluation of itself in comparison to other eagles, trying to keep up with the eagle-Jones’s). It’s job is being an eagle. Your job is being a human. You’ll have an easier job of being a human if you drop self criticism. If you treat your thoughts and emotions as being ok as they are at the moment. Instead, we tend to criticize our feelings, of say, sadness, as something to whip out of existence. Similarly we criticize our actions, and yet when we acted that was literally the best we could do. It doesn’t mean we can’t be better in the future. We also didn’t decide to be born into the conditions we did, or decide to suffer the traumas we did. So we are not responsible 100% for how we are. We are shaped by those things just as we are shaped by our blessings. Hopefully we learn to treat others well too, because that shapes how we feel positively. So my advice, be kind to yourself and forgiving of yourself just as you would if you were an infant. A loving parent just loves the infant without criticism. An infant so loved becomes a trusting and loving human being. An infant who is neglected has problems later in life. And part of being human is that we grow out of reliance on parents and must in a sense become our own protectors - we must sooth our own emotions when upset, we must nurture ourselves. Nobody else is responsible for that task (although friends and romantic partners can aid us, they still cannot be totally responsible or else we are not being fair to them, they have their own shi to deal with). You are and will be with one companion for your entire life. It makes perfect sense to decide to be your own best friend. It’s not selfish to be kind to yourself. Kind on an emotional level I mean, not necessarily on a new toys and tasty treats level (I tend to spoil my inner child with too many sweets and I’m a bad parent in that way 😂). But when I start to get depressed I have to stop and look at my own inner dialogue. It’s not nurturing. So my self worth is a decision and an action of self protection. Often when my self worth is under attack it’s because I hear the criticism of real or imagined others in my head. I can’t afford to listen to and judge myself with the external worlds criteria. And when I’m at my lowest I remember, I’m alive! I’m alive and this existence is my birthright! F the haters, I am not joining their chorus against my own birthright. Some say that God made everyone and God doesn’t make junk. We are miracles - we didn’t make the preconditions for our existence and we didn’t decide to be born, yet so many of us act as if we popped out of thin air and then get frustrated that we can’t control everything else in our universe into what we want. We don’t take the time to appreciate each breath as the miracle it is. We forget to do it and can’t possibly do it 24/7. But it really helps to practice it a few times of day along with a thought or two of gratitude. Perhaps I’ve driven too far off topic, but gratitude is a great tool for self care, so I guess it contributes to self worth.