We are led to find our purpose in what we do. Meet someone, and the exchange of this detail will most likely happen within a minute. Even if the word ‘retired’ is wedged in the description, the room feels arranged once everyone has said what they do or what they did. A palpable calmness and rhythm of conversation flows once everyone knows their place in the pecking order.
Because sharing our occupation is an instinctual part of human connection, it’s a short distance from there to people building their identity around their daily functioning. It seems like a mostly harmless conversation starter, but it can become a faulty foundation upon which much of our worth is built.
It starts early and innocently.
How’d we get here? Other, more intelligent people have written about it, but whether a career or who we are to others (mom, caregiver), we likely all started life through the lens of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Getting kids thinking about this seems benign and helpful, but the premise might be setting children up for failure—or at least the unskillful construction of their identity.
When things don’t go as planned
This week I was doom-scrolling Twitter and ran across a tweet from a New York Times bestselling author. Suzanne Young posted this message: If you ever want to see a career low point, this is it. Crying my entire way home. The message was above a picture of a few rows of folding chairs at a bookstore. Unfortunately, the chairs, ready for an audience to her author talk, sat empty.
What followed were replies of encouragement, and a few other authors shared similar pictures of empty seats that were ostensibly waiting for an audience that never showed.
If we struggle with accepting and living our inherent worth apart from our work or success, we are very susceptible to defining our lives by our functioning. When things are going well, so are we; when they’re not, neither are we.
Having a work-defined identity or worth seems like a good Protestant work ethic. This is how things work, after all. But how far do we have to go before we say: You’re only a person if you work? And you’re only valuable as a person if your work is comparatively prosperous when measured against others. So compete to have identity and worth. Are you sure this is it? If you’re winning, it feels right.
The storm of feelings and reactivity this dynamic creates can be a source of negativity. Ever known someone who only feels secure when they privately degrade someone else in their field for cheap success or some other flaw they think they’ve spotted? “Their work is shallow or ignorable”; once they tell you that, they feel better about their own work.
There might have been a time when this type of commentary gave me pause to see the person as unloving or caustic. Now, I feel empathy. They’re the product of surviving an unwinnable dynamic of finding worth through their work that’s been our societal training for ages.
The way out: Self-worth
One of the founding principles of Feral Soul is in Jesus being spoken over before his work even began: “This is my son, whom I love in him I am well pleased.” He’d done nothing yet. At least nothing worth writing down. Living in obscurity with a vaguely assumed carpenter apprenticeship under his belt, he heard this affirmation over him after merely receiving the grace of water baptism. He was enough already. And his Father, whose thoughts he shared, spoke his worth out loud. It must have mattered to the humanity of the incarnate Christ to hear that. Will we?
We must begin with our sense of worth; what happens next is not defining. It’s interesting, but the outcome of our work is not up to us. It never will be. We’ll all look out on empty seats eventually. The work we’ve given ourselves to will not be celebrated, valued, or noticed. Who are we, then? Dripping with the acceptance of God that has never left us. Or are we doubting our worth?
The concept of self-love has been labeled no-fly territory for Christians. They raise the specter of the sacrifice of Christ as evidence. But Christ’s sacrifice was founded on a sense of worth that was made clear to him.
Yung Pueblo is a poet and writer whose book Lighter: Let Go of the Past, Connect with the Present, and Expand the Future has been helpful of late. He writes this:
Self-love is the first step that all inner and outer success is based on. Self-love gives your journey the energy and stability to stay on a clear trajectory…
Real self-love is a total embrace of all that you are while simultaneously acknowledging that you have room to grow and much to let go of. Real self-love is a tricky concept that requires a sense of balance to be able to use its transformative power—it is nourishing yourself deeply without becoming self-centered or egotistical. It is no longer seeing yourself as less than others, but at the same time maintaining the humility not to see yourself as better than others.
As I near the one-year mark of this work, I’m hopeful that the ongoing work of correcting foundational flaws will be the help this newsletter provides.
Be well, Feral Souls.
