Deconstructing Self-Worth

I get migraines. I’ve gotten migraines all my life on close to an annual basis, on average, but I didn’t know they were migraines until adulthood. See, from the TV commercials, I had always understood migraines to be migraine headaches. Here’s a glimpse (keep an eye out for pre-So I Married an Axe Murderer Nancy Travis):

Editor’s Note: If it hasn’t happened already, it won’t be long before you’re wondering how migraines could possibly be related to self-worth, but I promise you I’ll land this plane. Please bear with me. Take an Excedrin as needed.

It wasn’t until 1998 (which, in a bout of personal irony, was around the time I discovered I had been having migraines for two decades) that Excedrin released Excedrin Migraine, but Excedrin had long held a popular association as migraine relief. As I understand it, Excedrin Migraine was essentially just Excedrin in a different box—they even said as much in their own commercial. It was the same formula (ibuprofen, aspirin, and caffeine) but with migraine-specific packaging.

Get to the self-worth part, Adam!

Okay, okay! Sheesh. Here’s the thing: migraine headaches aren’t just really bad headaches. In my case, migraines aren’t even headaches. They happen in my head, and they feel completely unpleasant, but at no point do I feel an ache in my head that at all resembles what I feel when I have a headache.

Everyone’s migraines are different, I’m sure. Even my own migraines vary in frequency and symptoms, but since I was a kid, it would always play out in similar fashion that is difficult to describe. But I’ll try.

He’s talking about when he was a kid . . . that’s gotta be the self-worth connection coming, right? Sorry, not exactly, but we’re close—be patient!

When a migraine starts, I get symptoms often referred to as an aura, which for me is when my vision just doesn’t really make sense. It feels like what my left eye and right eye see diverge, and my brain struggles to come up with a complete picture and starts shutting down the parts it doesn’t like. My peripheral vision goes dark. I start to see, not exactly spots, but kind of like lens flares. It’s like my field of vision gets much narrower and everything outside of my focal point gets hit with some weird paisley photo filter.

This is the only symptom consistent across all of my migraines throughout my life, although the intensity of this phase varies widely. At its mildest, I can almost pretend it’s not happening and carry on; it might fade into nothing or signal a worse migraine is coming the next day. At its worst, I can’t walk, and the accompanying sensitivity to light and sound overwhelm me. Regardless of intensity, the most notable symptom is that what I’m seeing with my own eyes no longer makes sense as one cohesive image. It’s like my brain realized an incongruity and melts down trying to keep it together.

After that visually muddled aura phase ends, what follows is like the eye of the storm. There are times when that part feels like a headache, but usually it’s just a sickening feeling in my head, like a clamminess. It feels like the echo of a headache I never had.

For the first half of my life, this phase would transition straight into nausea. I’d throw up a lot. A few times it came so quickly I couldn’t suppress it long enough to get into a vomit-friendly environment.

Dude.

Sorry! Self-worth, right! Where was I?

Throwing up in your carpool?

Yes, that totally happened!

*Turns off phone.*

Wait, I’m almost there. I’ll cut through the rest of the symptoms and the story about how my very worst migraine led to me feeling like my entire body had fallen asleep the way your foot might fall asleep, including my tongue which meant I couldn’t speak for an hour or so, and I wound up in the ER, where I was told I was having migraines my whole life and was finally given a prescription for it. Yep, I will not tell that story and move right on to the self-worth part.

*Glares at Adam with deep suspicion*

The point is that deconstruction of your faith feels like an existential migraine. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, you notice a slight incongruity. Maybe the way you hear Christians expressing themselves publicly in a way that’s different from what you’re hearing in church, and you can’t make sense of how your faith looks in those different lights, kind of like when it’s dark and gloomy outside and fluorescent lights are on inside, and the conflict becomes dizzying. Maybe it’s the way predestination and free will don’t harmonize in your brain and “It’s just one of God’s great mysteries” no longer holds the narrative together in your head.

Maybe it’s the way you hear the pastor refer to today’s culture as Sodom and Gomorrah, but then you realize your friend’s kid is trans and is delightful and decidedly not deserving of the destruction that pastor is prescribing.

Or maybe you can’t put your finger on it at all, but life the way you understood it just doesn’t look right anymore.

The problem is, we all have this story implanted into our very souls that tells us our worth springs from our identity as children of God and our faith in His love for us. So when you feel your faith in that system disintegrating—or even when you feel like the perception that worldview is offering doesn’t line up with itself in your brain—it doesn’t challenge only your view of the world, it puts in question the assurance you had that you are worthy of being loved.

It’s like the terror cryptocurrency investors feel every time that market shatters, a feeling that must be triggered nearly every time they open their eyes (a mercifully rare occurrence).

A migraine, to me at least, feels like the sudden trauma of having your sense of reality and stability melting away, the reliability of your very perception crumbling. Deconstruction felt the same way. I felt nauseous. I was overcome by fear and panic. My body, my spirit felt numb and utterly out of my control. Nothing made sense. I felt worthless and destined to be judged by Christianity and a God I no longer believed in.

My fear was that if people knew who I really was and what I had really done, they would know I wasn’t worthy of love—and there was no longer a system in place to take care of that. When I first left the church (in catastrophic fashion) life was constant chaos. When I wasn’t catatonic or deeply engrossed by distraction it was basically fight-or-flight mode all the time. I barely even tried to convince myself of my own worth, I really just avoided thinking about it as much as I could.

The thing is, migraines used to be so intense they would always end in a fit of puke . . . but as soon as that was done, I felt instant relief and a return to almost normal. There would still be a pretty enduring phase of just a dull, cruddy funk. In the last ten years, though, the nausea has stopped, with or without medication. I just skip that part and go straight to the funk.

The undoing of my deconstruction went through a similar de-escalation. The sheer panic subsided eventually. I don’t go into a full-on catatonic meltdown, but the spiritual funk persists until I feel pretty normal again. But the idea of my self worth has always been hidden in its own little cocoon. Any discussion of loving myself or valuing myself or seeing myself as worthy of love has felt distant and imaginary.

But I recently realized I’ve been holding on to the relics of a faith-based concept of self-worth. The idea that inside my soul there’s some kind of bank account that has to be replenished by God in order for me to afford love . . . the spiritual migraine isn’t the sickness that blurs that image, it’s the cure to that illusion.

Am I worthy of love? Is my soul valuable enough to love in its current condition? Hear me out, but I don’t think that’s even the right line of questioning. We think about self-worth as some kind of intrinsic value, but does that need to be there? Maybe the concept of worth is in itself a relic of the Christian ethos. I don’t think I’m really concerned if I’m worthy of love so much as I’m afraid of not being loved.

When we think about life after death, it’s natural to go that route. This is where the concept of God carries its heaviest weight. We question not only our soul’s worth but also its durability. Even more importantly, from the God perspective, we wonder if there would be anyone around to love us if we do continue to exist beyond the grave.

But if you set the unknowns of the afterlife aside, it’s easier to see self-worth as relative. I’m not really concerned with my intrinsic self worth, I’m concerned about my market value. The question isn’t, am I worthy of love, the question is Will anyone love me? 

Think about it. The question of my soul’s worth matters only when I consider what I’ll receive in exchange for a piece of it. If I give God my soul, He’ll give me eternal life. Deal. That made sense at one time; it no longer does. Now I’m left wondering, Okay, what will anyone give me for this soul of mine now that I’ve backed out of my previous contract?

Maybe stop thinking about it like that? You receive love from people, not because you are worth a certain amount of love but because that’s what people do. We love. Yes, it does operate like a so-called free market in a lot of ways. The more love you give, the more you’ll get . . . kind of. You’ll make some bad deals, and people will come out on the short end of some deals with you too.

But for the most part, if you let it happen like this, you love and you are loved because that’s what happens in this world. We get so hung up on finding a supernatural explanation for everything that we fail to see the beauty in what happens naturally. You can just enjoy it and be a part of it. Loving and allowing yourself to be loved (ESPECIALLY BY YOU) is part of what happens in our little corner of the world.

It’s an image far less likely to be interrupted by a migraine that can’t make sense of the dissonance, because . . . there’s just not a lot of internal conflict. It’s simple, beautiful, and natural. Go do it.