Insult to Injury: The Ongoing Pain of Worthlessness

“You’re too happy.” 

This is a phrase I hear after a person meets me on different days and is surprised that I am still happy. 

“You’re too busy.” 

This is a phrase I hear when a person wants to have 1-on-1 time to chat and for me to fix their problems, however, there is a waitlist of others wanting that exact thing. 

“You’ll be fine.” 

This is a phrase I hear when I am honest about how I am struggling and why they do not have to help. 

Each time these words are said to me, I feel worthless. 

It is as though happiness is to be stomped down as if I am showing off to others who are not happy. It is as though my busyness is not of worth to anyone except the person asking at that moment. But it is being told I am fine when I feel like I am gasping for air, where I feel the most worthless. 

I understand on an intellectual level that people are selfish. We are all busy. If a person does not want something in front of them, they attack it with words or actions. I understand that it is self-defense. I also understand we do not always think about the words we say to others before we speak them. Maybe we should look at that knee-jerk negative response to happiness, productivity, and helping people.

A little context without unloading my life story. I know in my bones that I am unlovable when I am in pain. I have accepted this truth about myself. I have worked on fixing this for decades. I have battle-tested this theory. I have tried to change everything about myself to be loveable when I am in pain. No matter what Nike tells me, I just can’t do it. 

When I am in overwhelming physical pain – and sometimes mental pain if not dealt with turns into physical pain – it is as if I become a prickly pear. My spikes are to keep me safe from more injury. My self-defense is to keep people away so they do not ask me for anything. My social currency is my niceness; it is how much I am willing to do to make someone’s life easier. This niceness is in the form of a pleasant conversation, solving a problem, taking on their workload, or picking up the pieces. If I am prickly (due to pain) and they are turned off by me, then it is the ultimate insult to a woman, people will say, “She’s not nice.” When a woman is not nice, she is shunned. She is placed on the back burner, put in an invisible turret, and cast out from society until she appears nice again. 

Women know this, no matter how much you pay into the bank of niceness the second you are not nice, that is all anyone can remember. When a woman tells someone no, she is labeled a bitch who does not care instead of a woman who is in pain. 

My every day is pain. My hips are broken in 3 places. When I was young, my father beat me. Spankings escalated to a large plank of wood that would break the bones in my hips. The breakage was left untreated because I was made to feel I deserved the pain. I was told to shut up about it. Gym class was a struggle for the rest of my youth. Pregnancy was a nightmare. And then I just got fat. Not exercising due to the pain plus feeding my feelings can put a lot of weight on hips I did not know were broken. 

It was not until I had enough and went to physical therapy that the therapists and later doctors were able to show me where my hips were trying to heal from blunt force trauma that caused them to continually slip from alignment and the muscles constantly trying to hold the middle of my body together. 

My daily pain is a reminder to just shut up about it. Add to that a stressful day, week, or season, and the waters of niceness get harder to navigate. Mound on a physical illness, and those waters are a hurricane that takes everything in me not to yell at the storm.

Because I know it is not the storm’s fault.  

Instead, I will send out a little SOS and let people know not doing okay in the nicest way I can. It is my way of hoping no one will ask me for something for just a few days, but it is also so that maybe I will be forgiven for not being the person they need me to be at that moment. There is a part of me that hopes help might come. But because we are all sending out little SOS through our social media and conversations, it is all just noise. I get back messages, “You got this!” “Thinking about you!” “Hope you feel better soon.” Those are great, and I take a moment to appreciate each and every one of them, but it also just tells me I need to get better on my own. I need to pull up my big girl pants over my broken hips and sail on through the hurricane, continuously being thankful and nice.  

“You’re not sick enough.”

When I have no other option but to appear functional at my public job, I am chastised if I do not match an invisible list of what not doing good looks like. 

I have been labeled as masking, faking, and camouflaging my emotions. When the reality is I don’t want to feel this way. I don’t want to be in pain. I don’t want to be stressed out. And because I care about you, I don’t want YOU to be afflicted by it either. So I settle into each moment, with people, and try to find the happy. I try to hold on to a sense of connection that circumnavigates pain. I also know that when I get home, I have to keep this up because the people I love most in the world, do not deserve any collateral damage either. It is only in those moments when I am alone that I can unwrap and tend to the wounds. Pain is a wave of compartmentalizing and separating what is helpful around people and what is unhelpful around people. My own trauma triggers an untrue cycle: 1. Pain is inflicted upon me because I deserve it  2. I need to be nice  3. Never inflict pain on others. 

I need enough time alone to practice self-compassion, challenge negative patterns, recenter the body-mind, be ready to receive help, and then seek out help. While I await this time, it feels like I am holding my breath. The problem is, I can only hold my breath for so long. 

Women are made to feel worthless. Women are taught to suffer alone. We are set up to hold our breath and take up as little space, energy, and time as possible. We are set up to fail. We cannot be too nice. We cannot be too busy. We cannot be outwardly suffering. 

I’m trying to figure out how we can face that worthlessness and turn it around. 

Nearly every day, I sit in a women’s history library surrounded by women who built community, and connection, and were conduits of care. Yet I see how many of them died alone. I see how most of them made themselves smaller at multiple points in their lives. Marianne Williamson said, “Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.” 

And yet, there are real-life consequences for women showing emotions – emotions that are met with insults, shutdowns, apathy, and even violence. 

Sometimes the strongest of us get tired. That is why women should have a circle of support that is not of 1 or 3 women but of dozens. Strength in numbers. Quality in strength. A circle that is constructed with the intention of not only checking in with each other but being honest, vulnerable, and authentic about struggles and our successes. Not relying on the untruths that strong women don’t need help. Remembering we are all trying to safely unpack a big hurt. Allowing each other to have a prickly edge, but be willing to put on our love-armor, and take on the challenge to love more fiercely.