You will never find a source of self worth outside of yourself.

On seeking nothing outside yourself.

On the road leading to my alma mater, there is a landfill. The entire city's garbage is thrown there. When a matatu passes, it smells like a thousand dead dogs. Like all the rot in our politicians' souls is scraped off and buried there like some sort of satanic spa treatment. On that route, the stench assaults the nose for what feels like days but is in fact just a few hundred meters. There's no avoiding it. Most often, I pass this spot when my mood is shitty, courtesy of the long matatu ride from Nairobi. Naturally, the stench in all its magnificent shittiness makes my already shitty mood even shittier. I immediately become viscerally aware of the fact that I live in a country whose government has no interest in waste management, save for recycling washed up 4+ term MPs.

Every so often however, when I am in an especially tranquil mood, my mind lingers on funner possibilities: memories of movies about raccoons that live in junkyards, or of a possible spaceship hidden under the garbage, or sentient rats cooking a conspiracy to overthrow the world order. This never ceases to make me happy—same stench, utterly different reaction.

Every day we wake up and sunlight gently shines on us, sparrows sing to us, dew rolls happily down blades of grass and the breeze kisses our face and tells us we belong. Every day we are validated by all of existence, and every day we refuse to listen and instead look elsewhere, wanting to hear the voice of reality's love for us literally anywhere else. We refuse to be present. To sit with what IS and listen to what it has to say to us. Like a baby bird whose mother has already chewed the worm up but refuses to open its mouth to be fed. Instead, we remain stuck in our heads, ruminating on everything that either has, is, or might go wrong. We choose to let our negative thoughts run; we get caught up in the stinking cesspit of human fallibility and instead of focusing on all the wonder of reality, we focus on all that is cruel. We go through the whole ride of life with our noses scrunched up. Indignant and hateful, because hate really does feel so good. We focus on all that is wrong with the world and unconsciously, in ourselves, we focus on all the lack. We have so internalized this paradigm that we forget that we lack nothing.

Matthew 6:26, which states, "Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them."

We tie our senses of self to too many things, so much so that we forget what exactly it is that makes us alive. The soul, the divine, our uniqueness. Our little idiosyncrasies, and quirks, and flaws. The cracks in our mortal shells through which the light of all that we are shines through. We associate our self-worth with other people's evaluations of us. Inevitably, we tie our self-concepts to a lot of material things, because they are tangible and easy to appraise. Our very humanity is negated by the lives we live. By the stories we tell ourselves about the experiences we've had. That we must convince everyone around us that we are worthy of whatever it is we want to be worthy of before we can believe ourselves worthy of it.

Nothing exemplifies this more than our relations with each other. Although a few thousand years of civilisation have seen us create marvels and masterpieces, some things are so deeply encoded in what we are that there simply is no escaping them. One such thing is the gnawing need for other people's approval. It's in the desire to be able to turn heads when you walk into a room. It's in the recoil when you feel even the slightest hint of social rejection. It's the self-flagellation when you are disregarded by a group you want to belong to, deemed seemingly unworthy of even the opportunity to earn love. It's the self-flagellation when you commit a faux pas, the feeling that even when given the opportunity to earn love, you seem to fall short. It's the looming fear of social death. This is the 'earn love' program. Because of it, every minor rejection tends to feel as if it's a negation of your entire being.

We find ourselves feeling like we have to do things, to perform a certain type of way in order to be liked and wanted. To feel as if we have earned the right to be present in the lives of those we love. In those performances we lose chunks of ourselves trying to be palatable and unproblematic, and then we proceed to resent the people that we lost those chunks of ourselves trying to please. The grand irony is that, because humans are highly socially attuned creatures, they can smell the resentment radiating off us, and they like us even less. It's a fucking negative feedback loop from hell. Instead of attending to ourselves and our own desires, we put all of our energy into trying to get other people to fulfill us. Of course, without ever actually articulating what it is we actually want from them. Naturally, they fail and we are filled with (even more) resentment. But because we are deathly afraid of losing the little morsel of them we (think) we have in our grasps, we never state our resentments.

Thus, we live. Our true selves imprisoned, watching as a well-curated shell goes through life in their place, polite, obedient, conforming. In the abyss is imprisoned every true desire we have ever had and ignored, to be wanted, to be loved, to be seen. What we want the most is what we are most afraid of.

We fight endless wars between our craving for connection and our rejection sensitivity. After a while, whatever love we felt for those around us metastasizes into fear. Fear of losing the little we think we have. And so, like the truly wretched beings we are, we cling onto them while stewing in our own resentments. Every day, desperately praying for them to notice all the pain we suffer for them, to acknowledge us, and to accept us, and to deem us worthy. Except that day never comes.

In making other people anchors for our self-worth, no matter how well they think of us and how nice that makes us feel, we are building a castle on a frozen lake, vulnerable to the changing seasons of the human psyche. Intrinsically we know this, that is why, no matter how much fame one can amass as an individual, our souls ring hollow with the knowledge that it's all fundamentally a cheap substitute of whatever we are searching for. When we cling to other people and their reactions to us as anchors for our self-worth, clumps of fungal-like resentment just keep cropping up no matter how many times you've cut them down.

We have trained ourselves to be out of touch with reality. We don't trust that what is meant to come to us will in fact come to us. We cannot walk tall in the knowledge that we are worthy of ourselves, simply for our selves' sake, worthy of being, worthy of existence. Worthy to receive and experience everything that it is we actually want to experience. Worthy of having our desires, our wants fulfilled. We find ourselves trying to earn our worth. But that's the thing with self-worth, no matter how much you try to do things to fill that abyss in your soul, it's just something you can't really earn. Worth is inherent, and all manner of resistance in life is merely a stage to display what we have always intrinsically possessed. Like that landfill, the world will always reek of imperfection—governments neglect, people disappoint, seasons change—yet our humanity remains untouched beneath it all, not to be unearthed by others, but to be rediscovered simply by shifting our own gaze.