The Day I Fired My Doubt

Peace arrives when you stop turning your worth into sacrifice. When the mask drops, your body knows it's home again, even if others miss the shift.

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I used to keep a running tab
of what I owed everyone.

Laugh here.
Listen there.
Shrink a little more so they stay.

I called it kindness.
My body called it exhaustion.

There was a night in my car
when the silence got louder than my excuses.
Seat leaned back.
Fast-food bag on the floor.
Heart cracked open enough to tell the truth.

No one is coming to pay this bill for me.

I looked at my own face in the rearview
and stopped asking for a discount on my value.

The peace that showed up
didn’t knock.
It just sat in the passenger seat
and said,
“Act like you belong to yourself.”

“Peace arrives the moment you stop negotiating your worth.”

There was a long stretch of my life where I treated my worth like a price tag that could be talked down. Childhood trained that into me early. When you grow up around addiction and volatility, you learn fast that your value depends on how useful you are, how quiet you are, how well you predict storms before they hit. Peace felt like something I had to earn by over-performing and under-needing.

Later, as an adult, I carried that same contract into relationships, friendships, work. I said yes when my chest tightened. I laughed when I wanted to go home. I stayed calm while my nervous system rattled like a loose panel in a factory. To keep people close, I started negotiating against myself in small ways. One more shift. One more favor. One more night pretending I was fine. The cost looked invisible from the outside. On the inside, it showed up as headaches, insomnia, numb evenings staring at a wall, scrolling, zoning out.

If you grew up like that, your nervous system learned a twisted formula. Connection equals self-erasure. Safety equals self-abandonment. So when someone treats you well, you almost feel suspicious. When a space feels calm, you start searching for the catch. Your body is scanning for criticism, withdrawal, impact. That is a survival response that kept you alive in rooms that never felt safe. Your attachment system wired itself around instability. Peace feels unfamiliar, so you keep bargaining with your own value to recreate the chaos you recognize.

At some point, something breaks. For me, it was that night in the car. Heart shattered from betrayal. Bank account empty. Life packed into a vehicle I could barely afford to keep. That kind of bottom strips your excuses. I remember sitting there, phone dark, mind racing, and realizing that I had been negotiating my worth with people who would never pay in full, because they didn’t even know their own. That realization doesn’t come clean. It comes with rage, grief, and a wave of shame that tries to tell you it was all your fault. This is where shadow work actually starts. In the part of you that says, “I did some of this to myself, but I learned it from somewhere.”

Stopping the negotiation is nervous system work. It is boundary work. It is grief work. You start by noticing every place you still try to earn basic respect. Notice when you explain your “no” like a legal case instead of a sentence. Notice when you over-perform so no one can accuse you of laziness. Notice when you stay calm in the moment, but your hands shake once you’re alone. That data matters. Your body keeps a ledger more honest than your mind.

Once you see the pattern, the next step is containment. You are learning to hold your own anger without turning it on yourself. You are learning to hold your fear without letting it choose your partners, jobs, and habits. This is where the inner father you never had starts forming. The part of you that says, “We do not argue with our worth. We decide it.” That voice will feel foreign if no one modeled it. You may overshoot into hardness or isolation for a while. That is common. You can regulate back toward firm and kind.

Peace, from this place, is not a reward that others grant you. It is a condition you protect. You still compromise on plans, preferences, schedules. You do not compromise on whether your needs are real. That shift quietly rewires your relationships. Some people fall away because they were attached to the version of you that over gave. Some step up and adjust because they were never there to use you. Your life does not suddenly turn into a Hallmark special. But the background noise inside your chest starts to settle. You walk into rooms with a little more weight in your stance. Peace becomes less of a fantasy and more of a boundary.

I think about sisu here too, that quiet Finnish grit that refuses to back down. The kind that keeps going when logic says stop. For a long time I used that energy to keep tolerating what hurt. Now I try to use it to stay loyal to myself when doubt kicks in. Same fire, different target. You may feel that in you as well, that quiet resolve that refuses to give your life away one more piece at a time.

You will feel tempted to negotiate again. Old reflex. Old contract. When that urge shows up, pause. Feel your feet on the ground. Notice the impulse to earn, to shrink, to explain. Then ask a simple question: “What would I choose right now if I already believed I was enough?” You might still compromise on the situation. But you will stop bargaining with your own worth just to keep the peace. That is the moment the real peace arrives. It starts inside your ribs and works its way out. Slowly. Steadily. On your terms.

I’ve poured everything into this. Healing Thoughts II: 33 Poems and Meditations for Emotional Renewal is up for order now. These pages carry the deepest, sharpest work I’ve done, and I can’t wait for them to be in your hands.

When you look at your life today, where are you still trying to earn respect you already deserve?

If you’re peeling back wounds like this one,
the 365-Day Shadow Work Journals were made for moments like these.
They speak the same language you do. Truth before comfort.
Explore the journals →

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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)