The Poverty of Self-Worth: The Day I Realized I Had Never Really Liked Myself
Somewhere between losing my mother, surviving my brother's death, and years of being dismissed by doctors, I had learned to hate myself quietly. It took a long time to see it.
There is a kind of poverty that doesn't appear in any dataset. It doesn't show up in income statistics or housing reports. But it shapes everything — how much you ask for, how much you accept, how hard you fight for yourself when the world pushes back.
I call it the poverty of self-worth. And for most of my life, I lived inside it without knowing its name.
How it gets built
My mother died of cancer when I was sixteen. My brother died by suicide when I was eighteen. In the space of two years, I had lost two of the people I loved most — and I had absorbed a lesson I couldn't have articulated at the time: that love ends. That I was not quite worth staying for. That I would be left.
Then came the misdiagnosis. A doctor who decided I was the problem. A body I couldn't trust. A workplace that told me I wasn't believable. A system — over and over again — that reflected back: you are not quite worth taking seriously.
I didn't walk around telling myself I was worthless. It was subtler than that. It showed up in the jobs I didn't apply for. The relationships I stayed in past the point I should have left. The dreams I talked myself out of before anyone else had a chance to say no.
The moment I finally saw it
Years later, in a healing ceremony, something cracked open. I had an experience I can only describe as seeing myself from the outside — clearly, for the first time. And what I saw surprised me. I had spent decades at war with myself. Calling it discipline. Productivity. High standards. What it actually was, underneath all of that, was self-hatred wearing a very convincing costume.
"I hated myself," I told a friend afterward. Not dramatically. Just factually. Like finally reading the correct name on a diagnosis I'd been living with for years.
“The poverty of self-worth is the one we're least likely to name. Because we've been told it's personal failure — when it's actually the accumulated weight of everything we were never given.”
I've been sober for almost four years. Getting sober didn't fix everything. But it stripped away the numbing. I had to sit with myself. I had to learn, slowly and awkwardly and with a lot of help, to actually like who I am.
Momera exists because self-worth isn't a personality trait. It's something that gets built — or eroded — by the systems and relationships around you. Every mother deserves to know: you are worth fighting for. Not someday. Not once you've done enough. Now, exactly as you are.
Becky Tsadilas
Founder, Momera — Movement of Mothers Ending Poverty. Based in Cochrane, Alberta. hello@momera.ca