You may want to read A Potentially Fatal Mistake, the article that lead to this one.

When I was younger, I had great self-esteem, but horrible self-worth.  Just because I was confident in my abilities didn’t mean that I thought those abilities made me worth anything.  Other people had worth, and always took precedence over me, because I didn’t have any worth.

This low self-worth lead to me being depressed.  I was depressed to the point where I didn’t really feel emotions, didn’t really care about anything, for years… about 5 – 6years, actually.  Near the end, it was bad enough that I couldn’t sleep more than 45 minutes a night, I thought about dying every day, and finally was ready to go through with it.

I went to the hospital because of the side-effects of such low amounts of sleep (seeing things move when they weren’t, etc.).  While I was there, I finally told someone who could help me about how I felt, and they ended up sending me to another hospital, where they gave me Prozac and a medicine that helped me to sleep.

I was on Prozac for 30 days, and in that time it cleared out the depression enough that I could take a good look at myself and my life for the first time in a LONG time.  I realized that I was keeping myself depressed by my thought patterns… I would dwell on the things that made me feel bad, almost wallowing in the negativeness of it all.

So I made a decision.  I changed my thought patterns… when my thoughts would start to go down that path of negativity, I instantly stopped them.  I’m not saying that this is something that everyone can just instantly change, but that’s what I did.

It worked.  When those 30 days were over, I didn’t suffer from depression any more.  I was cured, and I no longer needed medicine to help me.  Removing the cycle of negative thoughts removed the negative emotion of depression, and freed many of my other emotions, to some degree.

A couple years later, I had depression come back… I had allowed myself to fall back into the cycle of negative thoughts.  Again, I needed a little help to clear my head, so I went to the doctor, told him of my previous experience, and asked for Prozac again.

It was the same story… I took it for 30 days,  and during those 30 days, I really thought about what was going on, and I realized that I had only taken care of half of my problem the first time.  I had dealt with the negative thought cycles, but not the problem behind them, which was my low self-worth.

What I found, with all that thinking, is that I had value intrinsically.  I was worth something because I was a person… it had nothing to do with my intelligence, my looks, what I had or hadn’t done.  I had worth simply because I was a person.

I had felt this way about others all along.  Everyone else had worth, regardless of who they were and what they had done.  Not only that, but they all had equal worth, though some of them had more importance to me, being people I liked or loved or both (yes, you can certainly love someone without liking them).  In other words, the worth had nothing to do with anything specific to the person, it was theirs by virtue of being a person.

And that value was mine, too.  I was also a person, and I also had worth simply because of this.  That revelation, along with fixing my negative thought patterns again, made my changes permanent this time.  Since that time, I have been depressed, yes, but it has lasted, at most, a few hours.

Now, different people may have different reasons for thinking that every person has value.  My “why” is that I believe that all of the universe is a part of God, including each person.  I believe that God’s universal awareness is present in, and perceives through, each person.  So, in essence, any time you deal with any person, you are dealing with God, also.

I think it would be awfully hard to believe in God, and believe you are dealing with Him, even if indirectly, and think that the person that He is in has no worth.  In fact, God’s worth is so overwhelming that any difference in an individual’s worth, if it exists, is insignificant in comparison with the worth that God being present in them adds… so every person is of equal worth.

In case you’re wondering, I am Christian, but I think my understanding and beliefs are considerably different than average… you can feel free to ask about them, if you want.