From Validation to Liberation: Reclaiming Your Worth and Power

She feels it in her bones. The weight. The ache. The unbearable, suffocating grip of a life spent proving, striving, reaching—but never arriving. Her chest tightens, her shoulders stiffen, her lower belly throbs with a pain that is both physical and existential. The silent scream clawing at her throat is deafening.

Two years.

Two years of forcing herself into a mold that never fit. Two years of chasing a dream she was told she should want but never truly did. Two years of bending, of breaking, of trying too hard to be worthy of love, success, existence.

She drops to her knees. Fists planted on the ground, nails digging into the earth as if it might hold her together when she’s already come undone. The truth spills out like a flood, raw and ruthless. Her desires lay bare, exposed under the piercing light of her awakening. But something is missing.

All she ever wanted was to feel deserving—deserving of joy, of love, of abundance—not later, not after she’s achieved, acquired, performed, but now. Right now. As she is. As she always has been.

She’s exhausted. Tired of running toward impossible ideals. Tired of believing validation is the currency for her worth. Tired of convincing the world she is something to be acknowledged, to be celebrated, to be seen.

Deserving of respect. Deserving of love—given and received. Deserving of her own desires, without justification. Simply deserving.

She aches to exist without the weight of expectation, to shed the relentless need to prove herself, to release the suffocating belief that she must reach some invisible milestone before she is allowed to receive.

But inside her, a war rages.

A voice whispers, sharp and cruel: You are a disappointment. You failed at making them happy. You failed at making them proud. You failed. You failed. You failed.

The rejection of help. The recoil from comfort. The fear of being seen in her pain—because accepting support would mean confronting the truth: she was never made to make someone else happy. She was always meant to make herself happy.

She spent her life seeking their approval, their love. Her father boasting to strangers about her achievements but never once offering his own affection. Her mother, her grandmother, her aunts pushing the idea of a partner as if love from another could fill the void they left unspoken. She was always reaching—desperate to grasp something, someone, anything that would finally make her feel welcome.

And yet… she never felt enough.

Maybe, just maybe, it was never about the things she chased. Not the money. Not the career. Not the lovers.

Had she ever considered that he only spoke of her achievements because they were for him? That the lack of congratulations wasn’t indifference but a reflection of the fact that none of it was truly hers?

Had she ever considered that the women in her family, always searching for something outside of themselves, were merely mirroring her own discontent?

Had she ever considered that the reason no one had ever seen her happy… was because she never had been?

The revelation is gutting. A lifetime spent in pursuit of another’s happiness— A lifetime lost. A self abandoned.

She has failed herself. And it devours her from the inside out.

She breathes, barely, through the weight of it all. She must forgive herself.

Deeply. Entirely. Brutally.

Because nothing will ever be the same again.

Because today, she says goodbye.

Goodbye to the girl who lived for others. Goodbye to the girl who waited to be chosen. Goodbye to the girl who measured her worth in the eyes of those who never truly saw her.

She is leaving behind an entire character.

And in the silence that follows, she hears herself whisper,

“In the process of making another happy, I have failed myself. In the process of making another happy, I have failed everybody. The process of making another happy was always meant to fail.”

And so she lets go.

Not just of them. But of who she was.

Because she knows—

She is finally free.