You don’t have to earn the right to be here

You’ve been paying rent on your own existence for years.

The landlord doesn’t exist.

Here’s the bill, in case you don’t recognise it. Every yes you couldn’t refuse. Every time you couldn’t stop, couldn’t rest, couldn’t let anyone down. Every achievement chased not for the joy of it but to prove something — to someone, to everyone, to nobody in particular. The sense, underneath all of it, that you have to keep producing, keep being useful, keep earning, or you’ll be found out as someone who was never really entitled to be here at all.

That’s the rent. And a lot of us have been paying it since we were children.

I paid it for decades. I built a business at nineteen and worked myself into the ground, and if you’d asked me why, I’d have said ambition. It wasn’t. It was rent. Look, everyone — I’ve made it, I’ve succeeded, I’m allowed to be here now. And it felt hollow, because the bill came again the next morning, the same size.

Here’s the thing I want to say plainly, because nobody said it to me.

You have exactly the same right to breathe the air, drink the water and eat the food as every other person alive. No more, no less. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, where you were born, what you’ve achieved or failed at, who approved of you and who didn’t. The right to be here came with being here. It was never conditional. Nobody can revoke it, and nobody can grant it, because it was never theirs to hold.

Somewhere along the way you forgot that — or, more likely, someone taught you to forget it. If you grew up in a house where love came with conditions, where you had to be good, quiet, useful, impressive, enough, before you were welcome, then of course you learned that being here had to be earned. That’s what low self-worth actually is: not a feeling of being bad, but a belief that you have to keep paying for a place at the table.

And it’s why you can’t say no. Who am I to refuse? Who am I to need a nap, a meal, an evening off? A person paying rent doesn’t get to make demands of the landlord. So you swallow the no, and the need, and the tiredness, and keep paying.

Here’s what happens when you stop.

You don’t have to earn the air, so you can breathe it. You don’t have to earn rest, so you can rest. You don’t have to earn the right to say “not tonight,” so you can say it. The whole exhausting economy — produce, prove, earn, repeat — turns out to have been built on a debt that was never real. And when you stop paying, nobody comes to evict you. Nobody was ever going to. There was never a landlord.

I’m not saying stop working, stop caring, stop trying. I’m saying do those things because you want to, from a person who’s already allowed to be here — not as instalments on a debt that can’t be paid off because it doesn’t exist.

If you’ve spent your life earning your place, none of that was foolish. It was what you were taught, and you learned it well. It’s not your fault. But you can stop now. You were always allowed to be here. Take up the space.

Every Tuesday I run a live guided session online. Ten minutes of being in your own body, unconditionally, with nothing to prove and nothing to earn. Come and try a session, and see how it feels.

— Adam