Jennifer Breheny Wallace

But often weeks went by when none of my needs were met.

But what I found was that that burned me out.

And I wasn't thriving when I was allowing that to happen.

And so advice that I would give anybody who is in that sort of struggle of mattering too much is to think about every day one small need for yourself.

that you could fill so that you can show up as your best self for the people who rely on you.

And it might be something small.

It might be, I want to sit for a half hour and read my book uninterrupted, sipping my coffee.

Or for another woman that I interviewed who had two small children, for one hour a day,

she would take a walk, which was a kind of meditative walk.

It wasn't for exercise, it was it was simply to come back to herself and to show herself that she was a priority too.

So if you are struggling with feeling like you don't matter, I would say start with mattering to yourself again.

finding, getting in touch, tuning in to what you need so that you can show up as your best self.

That's number one.

And then number two, I would say ask yourself if you're investing in your friendships.

Finding one or two people in your life that you can open up to, that you can be vulnerable with, and who will be vulnerable with you, those relationships feed our sense of mattering.

They remind us that we matter for who we are.

Yeah, so mattering is a deep human need that we inherited from our earliest ancestors.

It's an evolutionary need.

We need to know that we are valued by our band or our group.

And so when we are made to feel like we don't matter, we will act out in ways as if to say, oh, I don't matter.