Take that Power Back

Anxiety has many roots. One of them is the fear of others, and the need to be liked by them.

I remember a distinct moment, long after my acute struggle with anxiety, where I lost my footing. I became very anxious and started to fall into myself. It feels like the rest of the world is very far away when this happens, and the myopic over-focus on what is bothering me becomes central. I bemoaned my concerns to someone in my life who listened carefully and kindly. Then with characteristic firmness and warmth looked at me and said something like this, “You were fine yesterday. You were fine this morning. The only thing that changed is that you externalized your worth and put it into other people’s hands.” This is something I had said to this person before, something I say to myself, but had forgotten again.

Oh, ok. My spine felt stronger with this realignment of what’s true and where I’d gone wrong, and I started the climb back up out of myself to rejoin the present. 

When we outsource our worth and our sense of being, we lose our footing. Everything becomes about what we are not, and about what others might think.

Take that power back. We are not designed to be something for other people. We are designed to be individuals who are in relationships with other people. 

When I get thrown off emotionally, it can be helpful to follow the breadcrumbs of my anxious thoughts. Follow them with me: I have an idea. I decide to execute the idea. The idea doesn’t meet the criteria that I had decided would make it successful. Someone doesn’t respond to the idea in the way that I had planned for them to respond (without their consent, of course). Someone doesn’t like my idea, or so they must not like me. 

I walk through those moments, linking them together to form a path to the place of valuing someone else’s opinion—or what I assume is their opinion—as more important than my own sense of worth and identity.

Maybe your breadcrumb path looks more like this: You want to connect. You’re nervous to reach out because it’s scary to be rejected. You finally reach out. You don’t get the response you decided you needed. You determine that it was a bad idea, and you may start to believe you are not worth connecting with. 

We’re lost when we go down that path, because it separates us from ourselves and from who we were created to be. But the good news is that paths go both ways. 

We can go back and trace the path to where we started to get off track, back to where we started to believe someone else’s opinion of us is more important than our own or than God’s.

Getting off track can happen quite subtly. We give our power away to other people in little moments, often just in our minds. Those moments can be as small as a thread, but we’re pulling at the thread that undoes our fabric, that unravels our sense of self.

Your identity is not up for debate. No one else gets a vote. Take the power back to who you were made to be.

You were fine yesterday. You were fine this morning. The only thing that changed was you externalized your worth and put it in other people’s hands. So, take it back.