Significance

Many times in my life I have felt insignificant.  

As a teenager, I looked to my school friends, I looked to my church youth club to help me fill this significance gap. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Teenage years are notoriously dramatic, and mine were no exception.  Life, I remember felt like a roller coaster and I hate roller coasters.  

I remember then trying to find this significance in my golf.  The challenge was massive but I knew a way to recoup the feeling would be to get attention and affirmation from other people.  Being desperately shy didn't help me, I was 16 years old - glasses, braces and a few spots.  I spent 6 months practicing then put my first cards in to a handicap of 19, I was called up for Kent Girls, not long after I was cut to 11 and I made the Kent Intermediates, my story was beginning and I was doing something great.  I felt significant.  I was something finally.  The feeling was only fleeting and based on my achievement and soon went away as I needed to push harder and be better.  I was accomplishing, this was adding to me feeling significant but this wasn't the source.  I learnt that significance was not dependent on what I did.  

Significance is within us all, intertwined with love and feeling worthy.  

Significance is often one of the ways in which we define ourselves within a relationship.  We all seem our sense of significance therefore from someone else - through their opinion of us, or in their attention to us.  We believe what they think matters, sometimes a lot.  

I remember from Catholic school learning that being gay is wrong and I spent years fighting this within myself.  Others opinions and me listening to them, believing what they are telling me and acting accordingly.  I honestly believed I would just spend my life alone.  

When life is going well, feelings of significance and worthiness surround us but when life goes tits up all that familiar strength, support and safety is long gone.  We then feel insignificant.

The last few years, especially having to give up golf, after achieving things some only dream of -  playing off +2, passing rules exams and having been lady captain of the club I started playing at, I have lost me.  I feel worthless, utterly worthless and totally insignificant.  This is me now. 

People try and tell me that significance and insignificance doesn't exist because you cannot see it, touch it or taste it.  

Fuck becoming ill, fuck it and what it has done to me.  It's taken everything that was me.  Gym twice a day and my golf. I am a shadow of the person I was. I have felt small, rejected by life and sometimes desperately alone.  At times over the last 5 years I have been to some dark places, in and out of hospital, catheters, walking frames, tears and pain that is indescribable and I faced it all, I have come through it and deep deep down nothing has changed.  I am the same person inside, I may not look the same - I don't weigh 61kg and have muscles to die for anymore but I smell the same of Hugo for Women and I sound the same.  The world has not ended but the world I knew has.  I have come through this, I've endured heartache and wanted to finish it all but I'm still me, I've made decisions that I never knew existed. I've had my rainy days. 

I have to choose whether I'm significant now because nobody other than my wife or my twin Daniel is qualified to.  Only my opinion of me matters now.  75% of the time there is nothing that anyone can say to me that means anything about me.  

Any sense of insignificance that I feel is simply just my perception. It's not real. 

Standing here at 39 years old, married, having battled to stay working, driving an automatic car, on 19 repeat medications with a permanent chest line undergoing two sessions of treatment every other week, having endured chemo and every test available, I am walking around like I am fine hiding everything that I go through.  This all means I am important, I am worthy, I am significant and I am enough.