Archeology of Worth

I was a talker, naturally and compulsively. I noticed everything, asking about everything, commenting on the people and things we passed. The kind of child who couldn't let the world go by without speaking to it.

There was a cultural norm I was violating without knowing it. Children being seen but not heard was the floor, not the ceiling.

I learned to read the weather before it broke, a shift in the air. Annoyance gathering in his face before it became something else. The way the truck slowed when he finally couldn't take it anymore.

The curiosity didn't disappear after that. It went underground. Took a while to shrink all the way into silence and hiding. But before it did, there were the mid-traffic incidents.

He'd stop the truck in fits of rage, keys turned to weapons, consciousness fading blow by blow. Then awaken to scalding, as she "cleaned" me up, punishment masked as care. For making him do it, for making her deal with it, for talking.

A four year-old's expression, emotion, even showing pain itself were punishable. You learn to hold, contain, and absorb all of it, silently. Failure meant escalation.

Later you learn constant scanning, reading the room before entering it. Knowing which version of quiet meant safety and which meant something was about to happen.

I learned early. Adjust or pay.

Armor

It didn't switch off when conditions changed, it just kept running. What got built on over it was competence, but not the ordinary kind. Performing capability in a way you can't tell the difference between what you're doing and who you are.

When the same message comes consistently from the people meant to keep you safe, it stops feeling like a message. It becomes what you are. You build armor from competence, discipline, principle, duty. You excel, become capable, impressive even...

You become an undeniable force of will. Stacking competence and achievement like deck of cards.

And yet the wound persists because it was never about performance. It was always about existence.

I wasn't just building worth, I was using it as evidence. Proof the verdict was wrong, a case I could demonstrate.

That's not healing. That's litigation.

It came with a cost. A rigid value system. Any friction, perceived disrespect, and the temperature rose fast. Disproportionate, every time. Friends would go quiet when someone cut in line, stood too close, bumped us.

They knew what was coming. Some called it keeping it real. Others said use your words. Those were the jokes.

Also how they told me what they actually thought.

Mentor

My mentor watched how I moved through the world but rarely spoke to it. When he did, it stopped me before the words landed.

He'd seen me clash with a customer I believed was wrong and disrespectful. To prove my point I escalated to inviting action and consequence. After things settled, he said:

"I don't know how you're still alive with that hard-on you got for the whole damn world."

He said something else around that time. Something about always building a case, but didn't expand on it. The discomfort was hard to dismiss. The kind of thing that sits for years and then one day clicks.

I simply didn't have any answers that held up.

Excavation

It didn't arrive as insight back then, it came in pieces, over years. Something someone said, something I noticed, or a pattern I couldn't unsee.

What I'd called clarity was the same vigilance that kept me alive as a child. Still running and scanning, just aimed differently than before.

The contempt was grief in different clothes. Rigidity wasn't principle, it was survival running long past the conditions that required it.

Seeing doesn't fix anything. But it does change what you're looking at.

You don't arrive at worth, return to it again and again. In small increments across a timeline longer than anyone admits. You forget, come back, forget again, come back again.

That's what the excavation looks like. Enough to keep digging.

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* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *