Red Flag
The quiet difficulty of letting yourself be enough.
There’s a red flag I carry everywhere, but it’s not the kind you see on dating profiles or TikTok lists. Mine is quieter. Almost invisible.
It’s this: I don’t have any sense of self-appreciation.
Whenever I achieve something, there’s no joy, no pride, no I did it. There’s just a long exhale of relief — phew, it’s over — and then, almost immediately, the pull toward the next thing.
After my dissertation presentation, the professors told me I’d done well. They used words like impressive and thoughtful.On the outside, I smiled politely. On the inside, I was thinking: they must be exaggerating. Being kind. Lowering the bar.
Instead of pride, I felt suspicion. Instead of joy, I felt disbelief.
I’ve thought about that moment a lot since. Not because it was unusual but because it wasn’t. It was just another Tuesday in a lifetime of not quite believing I deserved what I’d earned.
I can trace this reflex back. To moments in childhood when praise felt conditional, when achievements felt like survival, when love often seemed to depend on performance.
So finishing something, as an adult, doesn’t feel like a triumph. It feels like escaping punishment.
No wonder I can’t celebrate. I was trained to see achievement not as a gift, but as a way of staying safe. And safety, by definition, isn’t something you pause to enjoy — it’s something you maintain, anxiously, until the next threat arrives.
The cost of this is hard to explain to people who don’t feel it. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself.
It’s quieter than that. It’s the treadmill of not enough — finishing one thing and immediately sprinting to the next, never pausing to let any of it land. It’s the slow erosion of never once thinking: I did something hard, and it matters.
Eventually, you stop expecting to feel proud. Relief becomes the ceiling.
I’m trying to learn something new, which is that self-appreciation is not arrogance. It’s not performance, or ego, or self-congratulation. It’s just letting your body and mind register what happened. Sitting still for a moment after finishing something, and not immediately moving the goalposts.
I’m not good at it yet. Some days I manage a sentence in my notebook: this was hard, and I did it anyway. Some days I just say thank you when someone compliments me, even when I don’t believe it. These aren’t cures. They’re small rebellions against a lifetime of dismissal.
But I think that’s what it has to be, at first. Small. Quiet. Insistent.
If you recognize yourself in any of this — the suspicion when someone praises you, the relief that replaces pride, the sense that rest is something you haven’t quite earned yet — I want you to know: I think you’re allowed to stop running for a moment.
Not forever. Just long enough to notice what you’ve done.
We weren’t meant to live only in the phew.
💌 What’s one thing you’ve done recently — big or small — that you haven’t let yourself feel proud of yet? I’d genuinely love to know.
Worth your time
My Nonexistent Daughter by Annie Macmanus. For the grief that has no name, because it was never quite real — and yet.
sunday energy #58 by Zeba Blay . For anyone who has ever felt like their writing hasn't caught up to what they're trying to say.
Relatable is all I can say🫣
This was beautiful!