Why do I feel like I have to earn my worth?

Because somewhere along the way you came to believe that only what you earn is really yours. That your worth is a kind of wage, and you're only as safe as your last good day. It's one of the most common beliefs I meet in women who have done everything right, and it's a belief, not a fact. It's also the one wall standing between you and a joy that was already yours.

Recently I finally turned and looked straight at a fear I'd been carrying for months. I'd been afraid to look at it directly, the way you don't open an envelope when you're sure of bad news. So it just sat there in the dark, narrating.

When I looked at the real thing instead of the story I'd been telling about it, my foundation held me. The fear turned out to be not so scary after all. I felt the relief move through my whole body.

And in the quiet that came after, a bigger question opened. Why had I been bracing so hard in the first place? Why does so much of life feel like something I have to earn the right to keep?

The belief underneath the exhaustion

I've spent a great deal of my life as an earner. Somewhere along the way I came to believe that the only things truly mine were the things I paid for. And I built a whole way of living on top of that belief, brick by brick, without ever once choosing it on purpose.

You may know these bricks too.

The first is the belief that you have to earn your place here. That your worth is a wage, and you're only as safe as your last good day. So you keep producing. You keep the house running and the work cared for and the plates spinning, because somewhere underneath it you're quietly sure that the moment you stop being useful, you stop being allowed.

The second is the belief that safety comes from how much you can pile up. More savings, more proof, more plans for every disaster you can picture.

Why piling up never makes you feel safe

My own father lived this one. He came up in the Depression, and he kept everything. After he died and I went to clean out his room, I found a garage full of little bits of pipe and hardware he'd pulled off the side of the highway, just in case.

There was nothing illogical about it from his perspective. When you've lived through real scarcity, you can't be sure the thing you need will be there when you need it, so you gather against the fear.

But the pile never gets high enough, because it was never really about the pile. It was about the fear underneath it. And you can't stack your way out of a fear.

Every one of these bricks is made from the same single material. The belief that "given" isn't real, and only "earned" is real. That nothing is truly yours unless you paid for it with your own sweat.

That one belief is the whole wall.

Is joy something you earn, or something you already have?

This is the turn that changed things for me. Joy was never the prize waiting at the end of all my striving. I'd had the direction backwards the whole time.

The science quietly agrees. Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, spent years studying what positive emotions actually do. Her broaden-and-build theory, published in American Psychologist in 2001, describes how emotions like joy and love aren't only pleasant feelings that arrive after life goes well. They broaden what we're able to notice, and over time they build lasting resources in us, physical, mental, and relational.

That small finding rearranges things. Joy isn't downstream of your striving, a payout you finally collect at the end. It's upstream, quietly building you the whole time. It's the native air a life is meant to be lived in.

An inheritance works the same way. It doesn't come to you because you qualified for it. It comes because of whose you are. A child doesn't audition for the family name. She's born already held within it. "Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." (Luke 12:32) However you know your source, the gift already has your name on it.

How do you start receiving what you didn't earn?

You don't take the wall down with one grand decision. You start with a small motion in a different direction.

An infant doesn't have faith in her mother the way we usually mean the word. She cries when she needs something. She turns her head toward the warmth. That's the whole act.

The practice is just that simple, and I'm still learning it myself. Turn toward love. Receive it. Let it in. Put your attention there instead of on the circumstances out there that are always shifting.

The old feeling of disconnection will come back. It will probably come back tomorrow. The practice isn't to never feel it. The practice is to turn toward love again, and then to turn again.

Each turn teaches your body what your mind is only beginning to know. That the warmth was never out there to be earned and then reached for. It was the air you'd been breathing the whole time.

You were born into connection. You didn't have to qualify for it. There's no debt to pay. Joy is your inheritance, and it already has your name on it.

Joy was never something you had to earn. It already has your name on it.

Kristin Milan

Coach and author for women in the third act of life, holding faith and consciousness in the same hand. Master's in Social Work, degree in Psychology, HeartMath trained, and nearly five decades engaged with the science of change. She writes about outgrowing the aging default and coming home to a wholeness you already belong to. Meet Kristin