Waiting for the world to tell you that you matter?

The messages that the world gives us keep us small. They bombard us incessantly: If we don’t have this or if we don’t do that, we will have nothing. And worse, we are nothing. 

33 million people stood in this question during Covid when they were told to stay home, that they were not essential. That they didn’t matter. Hard to get out of bed in the morning if we don’t know we matter.

It might be your own book, already titled but still unwritten. Or the undeveloped business or organization that has your name on it. 

Perhaps it is a simple conversation with someone that you don’t know how to have. 

And perhaps you don’t quite yet know. 

While growing up in an image-driven society into which I did not easily fit, I was often compared to a relative whose life didn’t seem to matter much. And I deeply feared that mine wouldn’t either. These destructive messages left me with no choice but to rebuild the collapsed inner space I call mattering. 

I wrote the details of this deeply personal story in my memoir DARE TO MATTER: Lessons in Living a Large Life (Green Writers Press, October 2020).

Writing DARE TO MATTER was a hard decision. While it may not do much for my image, I understood that writing this book was a piece of my mattering. Why? Because I had experienced too many people opting out of their own lives because their inner voice told them that they didn’t matter. That their lives were small and not worthy of celebration. 

I knew that this book could support people with beating back those messages that keep them small and scared. Ultimately, I didn’t want to regretfully say, “That’s a book I could have written. That’s a book I should have written.” And so, I wrote the book. 

That is how Mattering works. 

In pushing back the messages about who  we can and cannot be, we come to understand the power of mattering: when we feel that we matter, we opt into our lives in a very different way than when we don’t feel that we matter. We make this choice over and over again every day. When we matter, we learn to dare down the false messaging and step fully into our lives. We make this choice over and over again every day. 

Here’s the truth: We cannot buy or borrow our mattering, but we can create it.