Are You Entitled Or Worthy?

By Staci Backauskas

When I was a kid, I remember a friend of my brother’s getting diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease. His bones were growing too fast for his body and it caused excruciating pain in his knees. Recently, the growth I’ve experienced feels too big for my heart, like Osgood-Schlatter of the soul.

When my girlfriend called me selfish for always driving 20 miles to pick her up so we could spend time together, my default was to defend myself. I was being kind, caring, considerate. Didn’t I lend her my car on Saturdays to do her errands? Selfish? What in the world was she talking about? ”You wanted me where you wanted me, Staci,” she said. “If I wanted to be there, I know how to take the bus.”

Relationships, if you allow them, plummet to the deepest depths of your being and draw out the meat of patterns and beliefs that have driven your life. In the last three months, I have seen myself in ways that make me dance with joy and others that have left me bleeding on the floor. And ego is having a ball.

The most painful to examine has been the realization that I have not transitioned as much as I believed from feeling entitled to knowing my worth. Entitlement is born of fear, the terror that I will always be in need. When I’m operating from this place, it causes me to act selfishly, although ego has learned over the years to mask it, decorating it with smiles and gifts so it appears as care or concern.

Instead of realizing my worth and trusting that we would spend time together without the need for me to act like a deranged meeting planner, I reverted to behavior that allowed me the illusion that I could “control” the situation to get what I wanted when I wanted it. I was afraid I wasn’t enough. I forgot that when it’s organic, our time together is filled with joy and laughter.

I am furious with myself. How could I have worked as hard as I have for so many years and still fallen, slipped down the rabbit hole and behaved this way? ego is furious with her. It hopes that being angry at her will absolve me from the privilege and responsibility of looking in the mirror. Of going through the process – rage, disappointment, hurt, acceptance. Forgiveness. Realizing there is nothing to forgive.

Ego is loath to release another remnant of belief, lodged in the back of my throat like a pill swallowed dry, that will further my desire to know who I really am. Fortunately, I’ve been down this road before. I know that kindness will enable me to move through this with the least amount of suffering. Please let me be kind.