Your value is not a public opinion
Your worth was never supposed to live in other people’s hands. Not in their approval, not in their attention, not in the way they look at you when you walk into a room and decide, within seconds, what kind of person they think you are. It was never in the clothes you wear, how much skin you show, how quiet you are, how confident you seem, how desirable you appear, how easily you fit into what others find acceptable. People will reduce you if you let them. They will look at one detail and build a whole story around it. They will call you too much for taking up space, too cold for protecting your peace, too soft for feeling deeply, too complicated for not shrinking into something easier to hold.
Some will measure your worth by how useful you are to them. Some by how beautiful you are when you are easy to consume. Some by how obediently you carry yourself, how little you challenge them, how well you perform the version of yourself that makes them comfortable. And if you are not careful, you start listening. You start adjusting. Softening edges that were never the problem. Hiding parts of yourself that were never shameful. Wondering if maybe becoming smaller would finally make you easier to love. But your value does not rise when someone wants you. It does not drop when someone leaves.
It does not disappear because someone failed to see it. You are not worth more in expensive clothes and not worth less in the ones that make you feel like yourself. You are not cheap because you are open, not broken because you are sensitive, not less respectable because you are healing in ways other people do not understand.
People project. They judge from their own emptiness, their own fear, their own narrow little definitions of what a person should be. Let them. Their inability to recognize depth does not erase yours. Their disrespect does not rewrite your dignity. Their opinion is not a mirror, unless you are foolish enough to keep staring into it. You do not need everyone to understand your value for it to exist. You do not need to prove your goodness by suffering quietly. You do not need to earn the right to take up space, to be treated gently, to be spoken to with respect.
That right was never something other people got to hand out. It was always yours. So if you have been questioning yourself lately because of who dismissed you, who mocked you, who overlooked you, pause there.
The way they treated you may have hurt you, but it did not define you. It revealed them. Not you. And if no one has reminded you lately, let this be enough for now, your worth is not up for public discussion. It is not a trend, not a vote, not a negotiation. It is yours. Quietly, fully, even on the days you forget.
