These are the questions that ground me in the face of all external pressures - status, conformity, gender-role stereotypes, etc. The voice inside drowns out the external voices and is trustworthy.
We all mattered the day we were born, regardless. We don't need to strive to matter. Father Greg Boyle says that our world operates under the false assumption that some of us matter less than others. Social caste systems imply that some of us matter more than others. This is a socially-constructed delusion with very real effects and consequences. If it is socially-constructed, then new ways of thinking, mutual and widespread agreement can usher in the revolution.
My clinical supervisor, Reevah Simon, explained to me that 90% of who we are is the baby. The baby part is one of an inner triumvirate - the parent, the adult and the baby - and drives our behavior. The baby feels the pain of separation, envy and jealousy acutely. The distinction between envy and jealousy is that envy is admiration and longing for the personal qualities or material possessions of another. While jealousy refers specifically to wanting to posses the love, time and attention of a person in particular.
The pain is strong and intolerable leading to infantile rage if the need goes unmet or is frustrated. We have choices for coping with this intolerable pain. The adult in us can work to attain the quality or material object in question. This is the harder and more mature path.
Take the Taj Mahal, for example. Imagine standing before it and marveling at its beauty - design, materials, workmanship. Now you can build one of your own or with a few well-placed bombs, tear it down. Either appeases the baby and ameliorates the pain of envy. Buying stuff and talking badly about others might serve to soothe in the short term, but in the long run, it doesn't get you closer to your own version of the Taj Mahal, which will eat at you until you get around to building it. Focus on what you want, not on what you don't want. Do the work.
In your own life, what is your version of the Taj Mahal? Feel free to imagine it, build it. Why allow marketed distractions and flawed social constructions to divert you from your original masterpiece?
I like knowing who I am and what I want. I like being around people who know who they are and what they want. Acceptance is both freedom and liberating. Feeling secure in the knowledge that we matter and have nothing to prove. When you know who you are and what you truly want - you feel full. The baby stops wailing when it is full.
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