The Best Part About People Telling You You’re Not Good Enough

You’re going to encounter some people in your life that suck. Maybe they’re good people, maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re always angry and judgmental, or maybe you caught them on a hard day. Maybe they just suck in that moment and you were an unfortunate bystander, or maybe they just permanently suck.

But no matter what, at various points in your life, your path will cross someone else’s at a specific moment in time – a moment where they are angry or insecure or suffering or jealous or heartbroken. And they will take it out on you. They will tell you that you aren’t good enough. They will try and tear you down. They might even try to convince you that you’re nothing.

Acknowledge it. Allow it to sting you. Address the wound, but do not allow it to seep into your soul. Do not let the things they say set up camp inside your head, so that when you are feeling particularly shitty or vulnerable, theirs are the only words that you can hear.

Instead, remember that no person can define you. No thing can define you. Even you can’t define you in the moments where you’re feeling worthless or helpless or judgmental of yourself.

You’re still figuring out who you are every day, and the only things you need to take with you from one day to the next are the things that are guiding you down a path you want to be on. The beauty of changing and growing and not yet knowing who you are is that you can pick and choose what you bring with you as you travel from one moment to the next.

You’re becoming you every day, but there’s no time limit on it. There’s no day where you’re finished being you. There’s no day where someone says something hurtful, or something makes you feel like a failure, and you are forced to cling onto that and let it claim your identity merely because you’ve ran out of time.

Allow things to sting you, and allow them to make you feel all the more powerful for letting them go as you continue into another moment and another day, being alive and being you. That’s the best part about someone telling you you’re not good enough – they want that to stick with you, but you have the choice of leaving it behind you and becoming more resilient because of it.

Remember, most importantly, you might be this person for someone else someday. You might be the person that sucks in their mind. You may be tempted to put someone down or make them feel worthless because you are having a particularly hard day or month or year. It’s okay to struggle. It’s okay to have dark thoughts. It’s human to have a strange desire to put someone else down because you think it’s the only way you’ll feel better. Just don’t act on it, because you have other options.

Yes, there are just some people in the world that suck. People who are mean and cruel and angry for no reason. But for the most part, we’ve all sucked at some point, even if we’re usually good people. We’ve all ruined someone else’s day, someone else’s self-esteem, someone else’s opinion of themselves.

Let these days be over. Let them be behind you. Do not concentrate on putting someone else down. Do not be the person that sucks in someone else’s life. Take this time and this energy and this fervor and put it towards the beautiful and terrifying and completely thrilling task of figuring out who you are.

Leave the naysayers behind you. They will live in the past, focusing on you and all the things that are wrong with you, while you are in the future, surrounded by the people who are just as alive as you are.