Worth, disguised
On Living: Worth as work as art as motherhood
This piece came up and was written stream-of-conscious. I thought I was saying one thing and then it became a journey of worth that ended somewhere else, and this is the beauty of writing. You never know where it’s going to lead, but it always leads you to somewhere you need to go. Also, I wrote this piece a couple of days before I immersed myself in a 4-hour-long EMDR intensive, and some big shifts have happened as a result of doing that work. So this piece on worth has turned into a short series of posts. This first one will be free, but the next post on rejection and the low self-worth things we tell ourselves will be for my paid subscribers because of the tender content. Then, in the final part of the series I’ll share my EMDR experience and the big shifts that came with it.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on worthiness lately—how we gauge our own value and the things that add up to feeling good enough. I never could figure it out. Even now, I feel like I'm missing too many pieces, and the ones I have don’t fit right.
As a child, my sense of worth was tied to my parents and their inability to be there for me. As two struggling meth addicts each buried in their own grief, they couldn’t show up in the way I needed. I had to believe they did their best, and perhaps they did, but there was a sense of lack that turned to longing that colored my whole life blue. I needed to believe that they loved me and that love was enough even if all the other pieces were missing—showing up, safety, dinner. So, I convinced myself it was; I lacked nothing.
Throughout my life, this narrative persisted, but deep down, the soul knows, and the body knows, and that knowing played out in the way I sought after worth in every relationship, every dream, every goal.
I chased golden dreams in Los Angeles, seeking to feel a sense of arrival, that I was worthy of living in a city people dream about. I landed the dream job at a record label to feel important, surrounded by seemingly importantly people. I needed to prove to myself that I was good enough to get the job that was hard to get, the job that everybody wanted. I wrapped myself up in the lust and chaos of successful musicians to feel chosen, to feel desired by someone who everyone else desired. I had to prove I wasn’t just desert trash blown in from the Mojave—I was someone worthy of doing important things with important people. Then, when the external validation disguised as worth faded, I abandoned everything I had built, to prove to myself that I didn’t need it.
For five years, I traveled the globe, seeking worth in cobblestoned cities, Parisian cafes, and islands that forever smelled of salt and sunscreen. Although I didn’t find what I was searching for, I discovered a new identity outside of the music industry—I was someone who traveled. Surely that was worth something. I thought it would be enough to make me feel good enough. Enough for what, I still don’t fully know. Enough to be happy? To be loved? Enough to stop running, which is what the traveling had become—worth disguised as escapism, as distraction.
Following my pattern of blowing up the life I’d spent years building, I stopped traveling in the way that felt like a gnawing need. I bought a house in a tiny town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, telling myself this was what I was after. It wasn’t worth I was seeking all along; it was a home. How domestic I became with my mortgage, my garden of heirloom irises and heavy-headed dahlias, kitchen counters lined with shiny, bulky appliances revealing my reflection. As the years passed and the mountains shifted from blue to orange to bare, I realized that home was only an illusion—worth disguised as security, as stability.
I convinced myself that this idea of home wasn’t about settling down; it was about being an artist, a writer. I think that was what home meant for me—a slow, quiet place to write. I sat at my writing desk in the indigo mornings, gazing out at the silhouette of the walnut tree against the dawn, while I poured words onto the page. This was where I found myself, my new identity. It wasn’t music. It wasn’t traveling. How had I not seen this all these years? I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I felt whole. I told myself I was creating something solely for me, telling my story because I needed to write it, get the whole damn thing on the page. I want to say this was worth disguised as creation, as healing, and maybe it was, but damn it felt good. It felt different.
For the first couple of years, it wasn’t about publication. Finally, I was doing something for myself, not seeking worth from the outside. I didn’t need someone to tell me I was good at writing; I just needed to write. But then, something shifted. I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment it happened, but I can only tell you how it felt. How the joy and flow and inner knowing turned to grasping, to pressure, to desperation, to not-enoughness. I was back to seeking worth from the external world. Did I ever experience worth in any other way? Have I just been living this same pattern my whole life?
My therapist tells me I don’t feel worthy or good enough because of the big T trauma of my childhood, marked by neglect, abandonment, and lack of security, safety, and stability. She says when we’re children, as a survival instinct, we have to believe that our caregivers are capable of taking care of us, leading us to internalize the lack as something wrong with us and not them. Children derive their self-worth and value from the reactions of the people closest to them, so experiencing neglect can make them feel worthless. I’ve tried to pinpoint the origin of my low self-worth but have never been able to identify a specific memory. I thought maybe it was when the police raided my home to arrest my parents, I internalized it as I wasn’t good enough to keep them. I wasn’t worth sticking around for. However, it turns out it’s more than that and started much earlier. It’s not a memory; it's something that is just in me—is me.
“Okay, how do I fix it?” I asked, because that’s what I always say. I'm a fixer. I have no other response. “It's a process,” she said. Of course, it is, and so here I am, mid-process (hopefully at least at the midpoint). I’m tracing this issue with worth back to the beginning and working outward, forward, in and out, and back again to find myself—not the self I am now or have been, but the self I’ve never had the space, freedom, or security to be.
I’ve been called a cycle breaker by my therapist and also by my friends who have endured similarly fucked up childhoods, some even worse. Motherhood has shown me that this is true. I can see it in every single way I show up for my son. I have broken the cycle and the pattern because motherhood is the only thing I’ve ever felt entirely worthy of. I can give him my whole heart, but can I do all the things necessary to build the life we crave, the life he deserves?
The days of writing uninterrupted are over, replaced with breastfeeding, stroller walks to nowhere, reading the same book about tigers one hundred times, and now, toddler walks at a snail’s pace, potty training, berry-stained everything, and playing drums first thing in the morning. Some days I struggle to do anything but love his wild magic soul and my own ever-growing heart because of it.
Is love enough without the making? Make the art, make the money, make the life. Mother-maker. Writer-mother. Creator in its highest form. Is this actually who I am, or am I just a mother? I despise the term “just,” and have written about this in the past, but what I’m asking is, do I have the capacity to be both/and? The writer and the mother, or is it merely worth disguised as purpose?
I have days where I effortlessly blur the lines between motherhood and art, but then there are others when the inner voice creeps in like a slinking animal in the dark, baring its teeth to put me back in my place. It snarls, “You are not good enough. You are not worthy.” Will my inner voice ever say anything else? Will I hear it if it does?
Last year, I joined
's writing community, Sustenance, and one of the prompts she shared was to explore writing a mini-essay in the form of a letter. I used Brenda Miller’s series of letters in “I Regret To Inform You” as inspiration and wrote a letter of rejection to myself from all the agents who passed on my memoir. It illuminated my low self-worth in a way that was startling. I’ll be sharing it with my paid subscribers. I’m putting it behind the paywall because it feels too tender to share openly.Thank you for reading my thoughts as they unravel. I wish I were a different kind of writer—one with a clear path to the center, with more grace and speed, but that’s not the kind of writer I am. I explore and meander and write myself into more questions, into deeper layers of truth. As I say on my About page, the writing you find here won’t always be pretty, but it will always be true. Thank you for being here.
Read my piece on “just being a mother” below.
