"You are allowed to let go into your bloom...even if it means outgrowing the spaces where there was no room for you."

Let this be the season you do the daring work of being honest with yourself. Ask yourself the question: “Am I doing what I’m doing right now for a reason beyond pleasing other people? Is it possible that I am trying to win a game where they keep moving the goalposts?”

Depending on where you are in life, you might find it hard to answer these questions. They may even breed more questions:

If you weren’t focused on people-pleasing, then how will it impact your career?
How would it change the dynamics of your most intimate relationship?
What would people think?
What would they say?

There are no easy answers. But wherever you are in life, you will always need to carve out space to ask the big questions and check-in with yourself. You were not made to stay asleep. You were made to wake up and come alive. Even when you were afraid, you were meant to learn to dig deeper, anyway.

Two things can be true at once: You can be afraid or uncertain of the future, and also know that there is more to the story than what you can see right now. You can be afraid and say, “I don’t know what lies ahead. I don’t know what lies before me, but I know that the way I’ve been living, trying to fit my self-worth into a box that everyone will approve of isn’t the way. I know that where I am right now is not all there is.”

You may feel like you have invested so much time trying to be everything to everyone, but it’s not too late for you. At any moment, you can choose to trust that there is more to life than what you have always known. You do not have to spend every day being made to feel like you are not enough.

You are allowed to let go into your bloom...even if it means outgrowing the spaces where there was no room for you.

Walk away from the things that make you feel like you are no one. There is a difference between being humble and being disrespected and undervalued. Sometimes, it can be so hard to know the difference, so talk to the people in your life that you can trust—even if you are nervous or shy to ask for help. Seek the kind of accountability that leads to cultivating a sense of self-worth. Identify the person in your life that may need encouragement when it comes to their self-worth and be the one who encourages them too.

You don’t have to be hard on yourself if you feel like you failed. You don’t have to blame yourself if you didn’t quite make the mark you thought you were going to make. Be kind to yourself, and realize that was the season that carried you to a new season of learning how to love and see the worth within yourself. Walk away knowing this: even if you didn’t stay in that job, career, or with that group of people, you walked away with a deeper understanding of your worth. You learned something new about yourself. Even if those lessons take years to find the language for, this is all a part of your growth and who you are becoming.

And in the moment, this is so hard to do, but this way of thinking is what propels you.

More tomorrow…
Sincerely,
Morgan Harper Nichols
@thestorytellerco
@morganharpernichols