They don't think I’m important

“If you feel you’re not important, you have a complaint that others are not valuing you.”

I was pregnant early last year, around March. My body was changing, my brain was changing, and without fully realising it at the time, my sense of place was changing too.

Around me, conversations kept happening. I would hear how someone else was doing really well. How they were stepping up. How they were taking on leadership. None of it was said with malice. No one was trying to hurt me. But something in me began to contract.

I felt replaceable.

There was a quiet fear underneath everything — a fear of missing out, of being left behind, of no longer being necessary or important. It didn’t arrive as a dramatic thought. It arrived as a steady erosion. A sense that while I was paused, life was moving on without me.

And with that came a subtle accusation — not spoken aloud, but deeply felt: I am not being valued.

That’s when this line came to me:“If you feel you’re not important, you have a complaint that others are not valuing you.”

It stopped me.

Because it didn’t soothe me. It didn’t tell me I was special. It didn’t tell me I was irreplaceable. It did something far more confronting — it returned responsibility to me.

I realised that my pain wasn’t just about what others were doing. It was about where I had started measuring my worth.

I was looking outward for confirmation of my importance. I was listening for my name in conversations. Watching roles, titles, momentum. And in doing so, I had quietly handed my sense of value to circumstances that were never meant to hold it.

Pregnancy has a way of stripping things down. It removes productivity as a metric. It slows you whether you want it to or not. And in that slowing, it exposes what you’ve been using to prove your relevance.

What hurt wasn’t that others were growing. What hurt was the belief that their growth diminished mine.

That belief creates a complaint. Not always spoken, but felt — You are not seeing me. You are not valuing me.

And the moment I saw that as a complaint rather than a truth, something shifted.

Importance isn’t something others assign to you. The moment it becomes that, it can be taken away. Importance comes from alignment — from knowing who you are, what you carry, and where your presence actually matters, even when it’s quiet, unseen, or temporarily withdrawn.

I wasn’t being replaced. I was being reoriented.

Life wasn’t asking me to compete for relevance. It was asking me to remember it.

This quote didn’t erase the fear immediately. But it gave me ground. It reminded me that feeling unimportant is not proof of insignificance — it’s a signal that I’ve outsourced my value.

And when you bring that value back home, something steadies. You stop scanning the room for validation. You stop measuring yourself against movement that isn’t yours. You remember that worth doesn’t disappear when visibility does.

Sometimes, what feels like being left behind is actually an invitation to stand somewhere deeper.