I Need to Stop Defining My Worth by Superfluous Standards

Love isn’t something you should have to earn, but you also shouldn’t need the love and attention of other people to feel like you have worth.

Photo by Gary Chan on Unsplash

I feel like nobody could ever love me because I’m not worth it.

I tend to attach a lot of my self-worth to things like my career, my accomplishments, or my status in life, which is a roundabout way of saying I don’t have any self-worth.

I always imagine that from an outside perspective, people look at me and see a burned-out loser wannabe going nowhere on the inevitable path to bartending for the next twenty years and fantasizing about a different life. I’m not the expert on other people’s opinions of me, so maybe I’m totally off base.

All I know is that I feel unfulfilled by the thing that, up until recently, occupied most of my time and that that lack of fulfillment permeates into other areas of my life. I feel like a liar when I say I’m anything other than what I do for a living, and I haven’t pursued any relationships because I don’t think that I have anything to offer another person. A lot of that comes down to this: there are 7 billion people in the world, and I can barely get 100 to care about anything I do.