It’s not so simple to navigate decoupling one’s worth from one’s work when you’ve spent your entire life working to prove your worth.

Conceptually, I’ve been on this journey for awhile. I understand that I am worth more than my work, that my work doesn’t earn me “worthiness points,” that I am not more loved or more lovable when I work harder, or that if I am, it is a shallow love based on productivity and not humanity. I know these things.

However, I’ve realized, in putting boundaries on my work, in order to achieve a balance between getting things done and being present to the world I walk in, that there are many things I’ve confounded with work and with worth…like writing.

I haven’t wanted to write recently, because writing felt like work, because in fact, writing is part of my work. But writing, in reflection, while always pushing me to grow, both personally and professionally, isn’t always work. In fact, it can help bring me to myself from a space where I am spinning, trying to find the grounding I need — something that work used to help me avoid, because there are healthy and unhealthy ways to make the spinning stop.

I can use work to distract myself (because there is always work to be done), or I can breathe into the space and be with what is there.

When I am present to what is, what is there needs a place to go, and when I am sad, that place to go isn’t through spoken words. It comes through writing, or through song, or through tears, or through cooking. It has to be transformed; it is energy that goes into creation or expression in one way or another.

I am learning to come back to myself.

I am reminded that I am in my writing.

But I am also giving myself grace as I grow. I will find times where I forget myself in my writing. I will have times where writing is labor and not expression; I will write for work just as I write for myself.

There are also other ways to come back to myself.

I sing, I cook, I cry, I laugh, I spend time with those I love.

I am still growing. I will probably have periods when I overwork. I will be too tired to write. I will forget myself. I will go back instead of forward.

Writing will not disappear. It will be here when I return.

I will not disappear. I will be here when I return.