Why Bother? And Other Harmful Questions We Ask Ourselves When We're Scared
Why bother; this simple and inarguable question plagued my mind and heart like a deep depression. It was infallible in its ability to rain on my parade of dreams.
It swelled up within me like a black cloud—it said that who I was was inferior, the world I dreamed of was true for “them” but not for me, and no one will listen. It all ends anyways, so why bother?
No one listened, indeed.
I, as friend relayed to me, “threw my pearls among swine.”
I didn’t listen to myself.
I didn’t value the fact that a Maya Angelou, my version of her very radiance, lives in me, waiting to be polished into the marble disaster-NOT, metaphorical relic of purpose, polish it into something more than the gravel I mistook it for.
Miss Angelou lives in me. Maybe she lives in you, too?
Why bother is the phantom cry for dreams broken.
It’s the dark energetic pull of death, heartbreak, and living in a world of O.P.P. as my teacher Iyanla Vanzant calls it: Other People’s Problems, Preferences, Points of View, and Perspectives.
O.P.P. will kill more than your dreams— it will kill you.
Dark, Lalita, on a Monday morning.
Maybe— or maybe not. I see in the dark and am confident in naming it.
What part of you is uncomfortable with the dark?
How many of your dreams have been hedged off, committed suicide off the cliff of “why bother” and “no one listens to me”?
Do you listen to yourself?
Do you consume your energy and attention with the likes of those who do not match where you’re going but only sing of where you’ve been?
If where you’ve been was toxic to your well-being, songs of the past are reminiscent of funerals, not the future. If you want to share your voice far and wide, what I know to be true is that you must free your voice, your self-reverence.
You must be free, mija.
My dreams were held captive by beliefs and energy so old they likely weren’t mine until I learned to see and crawl out of them. Make peace with them. Boundary against their revival from the root up and move towards the light. This is where seeing in the dark is useful. It’s one tool of many to sing your song.
Were you born with a free voice?
We’re born valuing our worth, speaking in a way that commands respect and respect, most of all, ourselves. But for others still, our voices are locked up in a dungeon or far away land within. They’re high pitched, monotone, and more present within their tone is the question of “who will listen to me” than the knowledge that they matter.
Navigating your voice to freedom looks many a way. It requires courage, faith, and resilience, and it requires you to come home to yourself energetically, cleaning out your vessel and practicing being heard from the inside out first.
Why bother?
Will anyone listen to me?
Where these voices live within you is your past.
Unresolved pain and suffering turn into murky waters, diminishing your power with each word you utter. This isn’t drama for drama's sake—although I love a good upstage shimmy. It’s the truth.
Who-you-are-not makes a withdrawal on your energy, lifeforce, and credibility each time you speak when your words, power, and belief system in who you are and why you’re here is caught up in other people’s bullshit, no matter how prestigious it looks.
You, therefore, don’t credit your account when you speak. You’re charged a fee. And it isn’t the winning team that benefits from that exchange. It’s that dark thing inside you run from, turn from, and don’t want to look at.
Who is this for?
This is true for anyone who runs and wants authentically to share their voice at the highest level possible.
It’s insufficient to run from unresolved pain. To enact change, you must face it bravely and play with the notion that they aren’t true. Shift your beliefs into a better future, a braver, more potent now.
Facing them is your first answer.
It doesn’t absolutely matter that you tell yourself your work is a worthy endeavor or people will listen to you as a way to ease your nerves and build your mental reserves if you return to the graveyard subconsciously each night where the questions originate. Where the debt collectors lurk.
It’s insufficient to run from unresolved pain or your external experience of it (e.g., a high voice, shrinking body language, combative superiors, perpetual fears no one will listen to you or why bother). To enact change, you must face it bravely and play with the notion that they aren’t true. Shift your beliefs into a better future, a braver, more potent now.
You must face them bravely and play with the notion that they aren’t true. Shift your beliefs into a better future, a braver, more potent now.
Facing them is your first answer.
It doesn’t absolutely matter that you tell yourself your work is a worthy endeavor or that people will listen to you as a way to ease your nerves and build your mental reserves if you return to the graveyard subconsciously each night where the questions originate.
Go to the root. Be brave enough to look them dead in the eye and do the healing work necessary to free yourself from their trap.
If your voice is trapped or not truly your own, and you’ll sense this is true for you if it’s the case, this is your path.
Walk it.