Praise Was the Harder One to Carry

Here is something nobody tells you about praise.

It is harder to hold than a wound.

A wound at least gives you something to do. You can push against it, prove it wrong, build something fierce in response to it. My great uncle told me I was a terrible artist and I felt my shoulders drop with something close to relief. I knew what to do with that. I had been doing it my whole life.

But the teachers who stopped in front of my work and went quiet? The strangers? My own mother? I had nowhere to put any of it. It landed on me like light on water — brilliant for a second and then gone, and I was left standing there not knowing where to look. Praise made me feel exposed in a way critique never did. At least critique kept me clothed.

So I did what made sense at the time. I put the praise down and picked up my great uncle’s voice instead. Carried it for years. Kept my art mostly to myself. Told myself I was creating beauty for my own sake — which was true — but also I had a secret. I had wanted to move to New York City. I had wanted to be a famous artist and architect. That woman was still in there, pressing against the walls of the container I had built around her. My great uncle’s words were the lock. I had put them there myself.

The same field followed me into my counseling career, spiritual work, and into soul readings. Again the praise arrived and again I did not know what to do with it. People told me I had changed something for them and I smiled and changed the subject. The critiques though — those I kept. Organized them. Put them somewhere useful. The praise I left on the table like a tip I felt too embarrassed to pick up.

This is the thing I want to say out loud because I have never heard anyone else say it.

The wound and the praise are not opposites. They are the same field. Both of them are asking you to orient your entire life around someone else’s perception of you. The wound says you are not enough. The praise says you are extraordinary. And in both cases you have handed your compass and all your personal power to another person and are now following them across terrain they have never walked in your particular boots.

I abandoned my inner voice more than once. Those were the years I do not talk about much. The emotional turmoil that comes when you are navigating by someone else’s map and nothing on the ground matches what they told you would be there. Doubt about who I was. Doubt about what I was here to do. A kind of lostness that had no clean explanation because from the outside everything looked fine.

What I know now — what the years have burned into me — is that there was always a signal underneath the noise. It was not loud. It did not perform. It did not need me to believe in it to keep transmitting. And every single time I listened to it, it proved accurate. Every time I overrode it for an outer voice that seemed more certain, I paid.

The compass was never lost. I just kept choosing louder, brighter things that served someone else.

I have very few genuine supporters and I trust even fewer. That used to feel like loneliness. Now it feels like precision. Because the only one who has ever been navigating from inside this life is me. My great uncle was outside it. The teachers were outside it. The people who told me I was gifted were outside it. They were not wrong exactly. But they were not in here.

You are in yours.

So if you are still carrying someone’s voice — wound or praise, lover or stranger, the one who believed in you too much or the one who never believed at all — here is what I want to say.

Set a boundary with the outer voices. All of them. Hold them at the distance of interesting information rather than personal truth. Let the change in you come from inside, not from the pressure of someone else’s certainty about who you are supposed to be.

And when the inner signal fires — before your mind assembles its argument against it — go there first.

That signal has never been wrong. You have just been in a very loud room for a very long time.

You are allowed to turn the volume down now or abandon it all together. Because the only one who really knows your truth is you.

.