Letter 5: A letter to someone who diminished me
Dear Boss,
You fired me when I was 17. You’d decided – based on four shifts – that I had no potential and that it was your job to spell that out for me. I cried because I believed you didn’t see anything you liked, in that painfully slender young girl. That there just wasn’t anything worthy there to see. You likely didn’t know, but she didn’t see anything she liked in herself either. In her eyes, she was ever falling, lower and lower. Soon she thought to sink into an uneasy eternal sleep below the horizon.
When I look back now, I witness a well-loved young spiritual leader who already had ten years of real work experience under her belt. With excellent exam results, despite having missed nearly 50% of her school education due to life threatening ill health. I see the girl who won a dozen or more academic prizes, was published many times before she even hit her teens, and had still found time for ballet and horse riding accomplishments. The girl who had been in a movie at 3, and would soon start attracting modelling work at 18. The survivor of so many deep wounds. I am proud of that girl on every level.
So guess what happened, when I stopped seeing myself the way you did, and started being proud of her? When a beloved mentor (who will be getting their own letter) stood strong in the place of the mirror until I saw myself as I truly am? Well, for one thing, I got the letters MA MLitt PhD FSA Scot after my name. I’m pretty sure that’s more letters than your whole name. I created a movement. I fought for others and won. I fight still.
I would have had to work well over 175,000 hours in the past two years to create my current economic impact at the hourly rate you paid me. I’ve grown a lot since then. Thanks to my potential.
You diminishing me didn’t put my light out. It was a stepping stone to the understanding that our lights NEVER go out. People like you just make us forget them.
What is it they say, it takes one to know one? I wish I’d understood that a few years sooner. That lack of potential you saw in me was a lack you were speaking to inside yourself.
To everyone reading this letter, this your permission to say a great big F*** YOU to anyone who ever doubted or diminished you.
Their doubt was never, ever, ever (even for one minute) about you. It was always about them. Always. You are bigger, more magical, and more special than they could ever imagine. It’s sad actually, when you think about it… imagine living in a world where your personal proximity to smallness is so substantial, you have to make other people feel even smaller, in order to feel powerful or big.
Don’t hold it any more. It’s not yours. You are an intentional, conscious, wonderful expression of the divine. You’re a fantastic, elastic being of incredible potential. Your light is eternal, and it’s waiting for you to turn it up to 11.
Forget the doubters forever now, and go do something great with that knowledge.
Find the mirror to work with (whether person, place, thing, non-corporeal entity or other) that reunites you with your ability to believe in your own innate ability to fly. We mirrors hold you, while you reconcile that flying always looks and feels like falling sometimes.
Know that you’re ready, you’re worthy and you are so much more than enough. Drink that in. Fill up on it. Overflow with it. And already, you are becoming more xxxxx
