The lie says your worth is contingent — that it goes up when you are chosen and down when you are discarded, that it lives in someone else’s estimation of you and can be adjusted by their contempt.

It is not true.

It was never true.

My worth did not increase the night I put on my grandmother’s necklace and walked onto that stage; it had been exactly the same the hour before, when I was kneeling on a kitchen floor picking up glass.

The only thing that changed was that other people could finally see it — and the deepest thing I learned, the thing I most want the women coming through that door to know, is that their worth was never waiting on that recognition either.

It was absolute the whole time.