22.09.2026 Diary XXII The measures of self-worth bother me

22.09.2026 Diary Page XXII

Whose scale are you weighing yourself on? No number that comes out without asking this tells you anything.

Tuesday. Today I will write about something that bothers me. It is not a big event, it is a discomfort standing in the background.

We talk about something called self-worth. Valuing yourself, feeling that you are enough. Nice words. But nobody asks this: what are we measuring this worth by?

When I look at the measures, I get bothered. Because most of them are not mine.

What I weighed myself with today

Let me be honest. Today I measured myself with these:

How many jobs I finished. How many hours were productive. How many messages I answered. Whether I was able to help someone. Whether I was "productive" today.

All of these are numbers. All of them are output. None of them asks "what kind of person was I today."

And the most uncomfortable part is this: the moments in the day when I felt good were the moments when I finished something. Not when I rested. Not when I talked with my spouse. Not the half hour spent in the kitchen while cooking. Only the things I finished.

So I had looked at myself like a factory. At the end of the day I had asked for a production report.

Where the measures come from

I did not choose these. I think nobody chooses them. We collect them over the years.

At school there were grades. At work there is performance. On the internet there are likes. Every environment hands out its own scale, and we bring that scale home.

Then one day, on a tired evening, standing in your own kitchen, you step onto that scale. Nobody asks you to, you step on it yourself. And of course you come up short. Because that scale was not made for home.

For someone with ADHD the measures are even more merciless

Let me write my own side here too.

Almost all of these measures are set for a mind that works in an orderly, predictable, steady way. A mind that starts at the same hour every day, goes at the same speed, can do today what it did yesterday.

My mind does not work like that. One day I can write for six hours and the next day get stuck after two paragraphs. Same job, same desk, same person. Completely different output.

When I step onto that orderly scale, the result is always the same: inconsistent. And right after it comes that classic sentence that many of us have heard somewhere: "not using their potential."

That sentence lives inside a person for years. I know it well.

You are not worthless because you are inconsistent. You just learned to measure worth by consistency, that is all.

The matter of other people's approval

There is one more measure, the hardest one to talk about: what other people say.

My insides warming up when someone says "that turned out very well." My doubting whether the work is really good when no reply comes. My giving the same work two different values depending on two different reactions.

It is not nice to write this, but it is true.

There are people around me who consult me. In terms of work, I am the one who knows the most at many tables. Even so, a one-sentence compliment can turn my day around. So knowledge and self-worth do not stand in the same place.

So what should the measure be

I do not have a ready answer here. If I did, I would be using it by now.

But I am trying a few things.

Direction instead of output. Instead of how much I produced today, I ask whether I was facing the right way. On some days all you do is not lose your direction.

Story instead of average. I do not weigh myself by looking at a single day. A mind has good days and bad days; its average draws a line. I look at the line, not at the dot.

Being instead of usefulness. This is the hardest. To accept that on a day when I gave nothing to anyone I still have a place. That on the day I was of no use I was still here.

My own sentence. If someone else heard the sentence I say to myself at the end of the day, what would they think? I would never say "you were not good enough again today" to anyone. Then why do I say it to myself.

The sneakiest side of measures

I should not pass without writing one more thing: these measures always shift upward.

The day you hit a target, that target becomes normal the next day. When a hard job is finished it is not celebrated, it becomes ordinary. If you stand today where you dreamed of standing five years ago, that place no longer looks like an achievement to you.

When it is like this, whatever you do you cannot catch up. The bar always stands a little above your foot.

Since noticing this, I ask myself a question: if the me of three years ago looked at who I am today, what would she say? Most of the time her answer is far more generous than the answer I give the me of today.

What really bothers me

It is actually this: even while writing this piece, a voice inside me says "if you write this well, it will be valuable."

So even while criticizing the measure, I am measuring myself.

Maybe the point is not to change the measure but to remember that it is possible to step off the scale. We do not have to be weighed every day. Nobody made such a rule. We made it.

What I wrote to myself today

In the evening, when you ask yourself "what did I do today," ask once also "how did I feel today."

Finishing a job does not mean a good day. Not finishing it does not mean a bad day either.

When praise does not come, the value of the work does not drop. It just goes unseen. The two are different things.

If you cannot say to a friend the sentence you say to yourself, that sentence is wrong.

And this: your worth is not a number. Every day you turn into a number, you subtract something from yourself.