Irrelevant

The three years I have spent working here, I have found that people tend to make you feel irrelevant and insignificant. You have to make a name for yourself and you have to make yourself significant. You have to make yourself shine. I told a story this morning about going to my brothers for a steak dinner and it was meant to be a funny story. After I finished my story, I got not a single response in a room filled with 5 people. All I heard were crickets chirping and the sound of my worship music in the background. How do you shine in a cold work environment gone stale?

How do you do that with a mental disorder? Especially when you have good days and bad?  That is a question I am still trying to figure out. One thing I know is you have to be confident in yourself and not care about what anyone else thinks about you. If they sit there and ignore you when it is blatantly obvious that you are talking to them and not a single person is responding, brush it off your shoulders. Get up and get a drink of water. Write a new blog post about it. But don’t take it personally. If they talk bad about you when you leave the room? Who cares? They are not the ones who write your pay check and their opinions don’t really need to affect your self-worth.

When you start attaching your identity and values to things that are worth substance, like people who actually matter then you won’t take personal offense to the little things. You won’t take a personal blow to the criticisms that surround you on a daily basis and you will have a reason to smile and be joyful continually. You won’t allow a shallow comment to burden you with despair and downplay the rest of your day when you have so much to look forward to and so much life ahead of you.

Living with a mental illness can be tricky because it can play with your emotions but your mind has to be more powerful than your emotions. You need to teach your mind to outweigh your feelings to properly cope with the things that bring you down. Do not allow people to make you feel irrelevant. You are amazing, you are special and you are one of a kind. People care so much about you. Just because the people around you don’t want to hear your story, there are people who truly do and those are the people who deserve a place at your table. They are the people you should choose to nourish and develop a relationship with. Cultivate that and leave the nay-sayers to be nay-sayers and allow them to be just that. Don’t allow them a place in your life to take up negativity.

Keep the positive momentum flowing!