THINGS MATTER - even if they only matter to us. My life is worth making an effort.

I’m just adding it, because I sometimes need the reminder. :)

so I was watching the Oprah “best life” series, the one from Monday with Bob Greene, and they talked about this idea that if you break commitments to people, it’s the people you don’t think are worth the effort, and so if you break commitments to yourself, likewise, it’s because you don’t think YOU’RE worth it. And, another way of saying this is, you don’t feel worthy to receive whatever it is you’ve promised yourself. That really struck a chord with me and helped me reframe what I was getting at when I wrote this goal.

I’ve often thought that my problem is that I don’t feel like the effort is worth it – whatever it is – the effort to get in shape, the effort to make friends, to do something better with my life, and I’ve thought that the root of this feeling has something to do with sensing the impending loss in everything. It all passes anyway. Life is short. Nothing we do here will be remembered anyway. My life is unimportant. Or whatever. I have been aware that there’s this problem of not wanting or caring about things enough. Not being able to get myself to feel invested.

But it really struck me when they said that another way of saying “I’m not worth it” is “I don’t feel WORTHY.” When you say it that way, it seems to mean something else. It doesn’t just mean, oh, it’s too much effort, why bother? IT MEANS you don’t think you deserve it. You don’t think you’re worthy of happiness.

So it’s about feeling small, feeling like you are of little value. It hadn’t occurred to me to realize that maybe THOSE kinds of feelings are at the bottom of the difficulty with caring very much. The feeling SEEMS on the surface to be about letting go, failure to want anything enough, a deficit of energy and enthusiasm (and how can anyone address THAT? How can you make yourself WANT more??)

But maybe in fact the root of it is actually a poor self-regard, an undeserving feeling. And that is something that I think I COULD address and try to do something about. At least be aware of.