The most vulnerable thing in this world is to open up to a person, to show the person your secrets and your true condition. To share with the person your dreams, your hopes, your fears, your phobia, your trauma, your beliefs, your feelings, your propensities, your weaknesses, your childlikeness, your unprotected true nature.

When you have thus exposed yourself to a person, vulnerable to the core, and the person – after taking a good look at you – rejects or betrays you, and directly or indirectly communicates to you that they find you to be unworthy of them, the damage that this experience can cause to a human soul is almost beyond the purview of what words can accurately describe. It is exceedingly humiliating, dehumanising, and robs you of your sense of self-worth.

It also gives reason to ask yourself, if you too have ever done the same to another human being, maybe even without realising it, and maybe you have even forgotten it. If you have, then it pays to reflect on how to reach those people once more and offer them correction, retribution, a cure, or just true heartfelt apology and remorse for having broken their soul.

Most of all, though, it gives us an opportunity to reflect on the question of whether a human being’s sense of self-worth should at all be wholly or partly dependent on how they are seen or held or treated by another human being, probably one whom they love, or sometimes even a stranger. Or whether a human being’s sense of worth should be rooted only and solely in their own inner strength and inner dignity and Inner fidelity to their own core values. Or if it is a mixture of both extremes.

One thing is for sure, though, and that is that no matter how we see it, the reality is that even the strongest people are affected by how they are seen and treating by one person or the other, consciously or unconsciously, either a stranger or more commonly someone that they deeply love. No matter how we see it, we owe the duty to ourselves as human beings to be thoughtful, careful, honest – honest to ourselves and also honest to others – in order not to disappoint a valid expectation of reflected worthiness.

Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Undulating Plains