Finding True Self Worth by Susan Caldwell

When I was in grade school I remember living in anxious anticipation of the “next” birthday-slumber party. The first hurdle toward victory (feeling good about oneself) was the invitation, you know, making the cut and being included in someone’s “inner” circle. In the small little world I grew up in, this was also “the” outward sign of where one belonged on the social ladder…the caste system of American middle class.
This phobia of not making a cut was only equaled in fear to the alarm I felt when found included on the list of “invites” to a party being given by one considered last on the rung.

Once the division of who’s who was established and the correct socially desirable RSVP’s made, the next hurdle came when it was time to lay your sleeping bag down. There was a statement of ones place in the pecking order here as well. Whoever slept closest to the birthday celebrant was the next most powerful person in attendance, at that moment. And the future of many a young girl’s self worth hung in the balance of how this power was used.

I have yet to determine, some 40 odd years later if there was any edifying actions that came from this adolescent cultural ritual. I know only what I experienced myself and when my daughters passed through this age in their lives I was prompted to draw this conclusion; nothing good happens at a slumber party after 10:00pm. I don’t know if it was the lack of ability to handle the indiscriminate power that was handed out undeserved and unproven, but I do know that words spoken in the dark by insecure, sugar-induced hyperactive, pre-pubescent girls can leave scars that last a lifetime.

Not that this will come as much of a surprise to anyone, but I never rose very high on the social ladder and I myself responsible for that. Well okay, maybe it would have helped if my parents had been a bit “cooler” or I had had an older brother who was a star athlete, or my older sister a beauty queen or I had been the smartest or cutest or most likely to… succeed at anything… But, the truth was and is, I was just normal, average maybe even a bit under-average; and just average does not make the top rung of (m)any ladders.

Maybe it is unrealistic to hope that we will ever be able to change this misguided childhood ritual. Looking back, whether we attained the perfect personae of slumber-party giver/goer, or we failed at ever making anyone’s invite list, I can see the opportunity was there for each of us to learn how to measure self worth. I know what I learned from it…some good things; true self-worth is not attained through popularity and some hard things; everyone has misused power and position in the attempt to find and measure self worth. There is a great freedom that does come when we stop using others as social implants with the hope to appear more than we really are and a lot of the fear that accompanied the need to know how we measure up seems to dissolve as well. I know for me, when I do succeed at treating people equally; taking no ones self worth away and giving no one more power than they have respectively earned, the need to look for ways to measure my social status or value to the community around me lessens and I find myself actually starting to feel good about myself…