Unrecognised Worthiness
Enjoy this character art of Colony Commander Tun, who definitely will NOT recognise your worthiness.
A few of my author friends have written recently about how many of their characters struggle with feeling unworthy, and have related it back to their own feelings of unworthiness. It got me thinking about my own main characters, and I noticed a different but related problem–unrecognised worthiness.
I was in my late teens when Disney’s Aladdin came out, and it remains one of my favourite animated movies, perhaps because I relate so strongly to Aladdin. His reprise, ‘if only they’d look closer, they’d find out there’s so much more to me’ still hits me in the gut.
Growing up, I felt disregarded, unimportant, and pushed aside. I was marginalised for being intelligent, for being moral, for having different values. My sense of my own worth wasn’t in question, but it wasn’t upheld by others.
This became a huge factor in my perfectionism. I was always trying to prove my worth. Decades later, and it’s still much the same. I don’t feel like I matter to anyone. Not in the way I want to matter anyway.
It’s a different kind of pain, knowing that you’re worthy but not having other people recognise it. I think that’s why I have always felt empathy for marginalised groups of people. Always felt solidarity with them.
I’m pretty sure it’s also why the two main characters I’ve written so far also struggle with the same thing. In Son of Osivirius, Jayden rails against the unfairness of the treatment of the people living in Wormsville, the underground billets of the colony. That sense of injustice grows out of an innate sense of knowing he has worth.
It makes sense, doesn’t it?
That’s why one of the themes of this novella centres around our common dignity, and the injustice of exploitation. I hope it both speaks to your own worth as a person, and lets you know you matter.
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