What if Nothing About You Needed Fixing?
You’ve been building your life around a deficit that was never real.
You’re not fine all the time — none of us are — yet somewhere along the way you learned to treat self-worth like a marketplace. To measure your value by how much affirmation, affection, or attention you could extract from others. A smile. A click. A yes. A promotion. As if proof of being lovable had to be earned in public before it could be felt in private.
This is exhausting by design. You chase validation the way someone chases sleep after three espressos — frantically, uselessly, wondering why rest never arrives.
The core mistake isn’t wanting recognition — it’s outsourcing the entire operation of knowing whether you matter to a rotating panel of half-distracted strangers.
Think about the things that knot you up. The voice that goes silent in meetings. The project you won't start because what if no one cares. The boundary you can't set because what if they leave. Strip away the theater of circumstance and you'll find the same wire underneath: I don't know if I'm worth keeping.
And here's the thing — you've been right to feel uncertain. Because the evidence you've been using is corrupt. Likes are not love. Attention is not acceptance. Success is not proof you were supposed to be here.
You’ve been asking the wrong company to blue-check-mark your existence — and the company keeps changing ownership.
So what happens if you stop asking?
Not in a spiritual-bypass, I'm-above-needing-people way. You're not above it. You're human. You'll want the nod, the warmth, the sense that someone sees you. That's not the problem. The problem is making other people's perception the load-bearing wall of your human experience.
What if your worth wasn't a conclusion someone else arrived at, but something you carried with you — dull, solid, unspectacular — like a purse?
You have a heart that responds to things. You try. You fail and come back. You feel joy, even if it's brief. You give a damn about something, even if you've been told it doesn't count. You've survived every version of yourself that thought it couldn't.
These aren't achievements. They're not even virtues. They're just the raw facts of you, moving through time, making meaning out of nothing because that's what humans do.
The machine wants you addicted to external feedback because it keeps you available, impressionable, refreshing the page.
And you’ve been checking — waiting for the world to confirm that you’re ready, that you’ve earned it, that you’ve fixed enough of yourself and made enough for yourself to qualify for full participation. Meanwhile, the version of you that doesn’t need any of that has been sitting in the corner, bored out of its mind, wondering when you’ll finally get over it.
Here's what you're avoiding by staying in the validation loop: responsibility. Not the punishing kind — the kind that comes with authorship. If your worth isn't contingent on external approval, then your choices become yours. Your desires stop being ballots. Your failures stop being verdicts.
You have to live your life as if it's yours, which is harder than it sounds because it means you can't blame the spectators anymore when things don't land.
The shift doesn't happen all at once. It's more like learning to notice a different signal. You've been tuning your whole nervous system to pick up approval, rejection, indifference — the extrinsic. Now you're learning to feel for something intrinsic. The satisfaction of showing up. The weight of choosing something because it matters to you, not because it photographs well.
It's less dramatic than you'd think. You don't suddenly become unshakable. You just stop collapsing every time someone doesn't understand you.
You spend time with yourself and realise you're decent company — you haven't “arrived”, you've simply stopped treating your own presence like a problem to be solved before the real life can begin.
You notice the part of you that keeps trying, even when it's messy — the part that reaches for joy, for curiosity, for connection, because that’s what being alive looks like when you stop apologising for taking up space.
You see the love you give, even when it's clumsy. The care you put into things no one's tracking. The fact that you keep coming back to what matters, even after you've wandered off.
None of this makes you special. It makes you human. And being human was never the problem — becoming a machine is.
Ask yourself: what shifts if you walked into your life assuming you were already worth keeping — as if that were the starting condition, a simple given, not a reward for good behavior?
Would you stop negotiating with yourself about whether you’re allowed to want things — set the boundary, start the project, and say it?
You'd stop treating every interaction like an audition and start treating it like an exchange between two people who are both here, both real, both allowed to take up space without groveling for it.
You'd make things and release them into the world without needing them to save you. You'd fail and it would sting, but it wouldn't erase you because you'd stop using other people's reactions as the scoreboard for whether you should exist.
This is meaning-making as a physical act. Not something you think your way into, but something you do with your hands, your voice, your vision. You choose what you care about. You commit to it even when it's inconvenient. You let yourself feel the satisfaction of showing up, of trying, of participating in your own life without a guarantee it'll pay off.
Try this: Find one thing you do that no one else sees, and appreciate it — the way you make coffee, the care you put into picking emojis and spell-checking your message, the fact that you tried to give something your best.
Next time you catch yourself spiraling into self-doubt, ask yourself: whose opinion am I using as evidence? Then ask again: what if I didn’t need their authorisation to proceed?
You don't need an incontestable sense of self-worth to start living. Stop waiting for it. Act as if you're allowed to be here, even before the world sends its kudos. Nothing about you needs fixing — everything in you is asking to be encountered.