Here’s a thought—don’t take life personally. Don’t take what befalls you as condemnation of your soul. People may be mean, may bully you, single you out for personal attack. But whatever harm they perpetrate on you is a reflection of how they feel about themselves. How you feel about yourself is what matters.
Sure, it is difficult, and feels downright impossible to have faith in ourselves when we are hurting or someone is hurting us, perhaps even hating us.
Growing up in my family, I got the message from my parents that I did not matter. They may not have believed that, but that’s what I picked up subconsciously. When I revealed to them that I was in a sexual relationship with a twenty-five-year-old man in our neighborhood and that I said I loved him, they didn’t do anything. They were overwhelmed. That was just too much, so, life went on as usual. I continued seeing this man. Mandated reporters knew about him, like my pediatrician, who in all fairness hoped my parents would do something, but his hands were tied once they were notified; and the psychologist I saw exactly once for fifteen minutes in his office. He didn’t do anything. My parents didn’t press charges. They didn’t protect or hinder me. The message I got was, “You don’t matter.” I continued seeing this man, becoming more and more miserable as the months and years went by because I couldn’t break away from him. I wanted him to care about me; I wanted to matter to him. I wanted to be somebody in the world. I just went about it in the wrong way and didn’t get proper help for a long time.
But I persevered. I didn’t give up on myself. I was persistent in discovering who I am in this world and where I belong in it, which is with all of you.
We belong to one another. All of us belong to one another.
We belong to one another. All of us belong to one another. We may feel isolated, damaged, disconnected, like we don’t belong to the human race. But like Carl Jung said, our collective unconscious is like a chain of islands that look like separate entities, but beneath the surface we are all connected. We swim in the waters of divinity.
It’s taken years and decades for me to learn that I do matter and I don’t need to get the world to prove it to me. A dear friend recently shared a realization she had: “I’m valuable just because I am.” I love that statement. Lucky for her she found that wisdom relatively early in life and is now walking in the light of that soul knowledge. It has changed her outlook on life, her attitude towards herself and others. She treats herself with respect and honors the autonomy of others with the dignity they deserve.
My spin on that statement is: “I matter because I am.”
I believe anyone who survives the trauma of birth, who leaves the protective warmth of the womb and explodes into the cold brightness of this world deserves that badge of courage and honor just to have survived. Here we are, no matter what our status or position in life or what we have done with it, we matter. We can’t control what befalls us. We can’t control whether someone rapes us, molests us, bombs us, spits on us, or whether we get cancer or some other horrible disease, or whether our house burns down, or our child dies in a car crash. We can’t control the way people treat us because we were born with skin the color of pale brown sand or black loamy earth. We matter and are beautiful and valuable despite all the ugly horrible, painful things that happen to us in this world.
We matter and are beautiful and valuable despite all the ugly, horrible, painful things that happen to us in this world.
When our solar system was born suns exploded, planets collided. It was violent and terrible, and yet here we are in this gorgeous solar system of planets floating in orbit around one another in peaceful synchronicity.
This is who we are—family. We may not realize it and treat each other as if we are enemies. But life is long and maybe we’ll use this time on Earth to slowly evolve and eventually to realize we are valuable just because we are. You matter. I matter. We matter to each other. Just because we are.
"Life is a gift for which we are grateful. We gather in community to celebrate the wonders and mysteries of this great gift."--Chalice lighting blessing of the Unitarian Universalist Church