Definition of damaged goods: inadequate or impaired. Products that are broken, cracked, or scratched. A person considered no longer desirable or valuable because of something that has happened—someone whose reputation is damaged.
Are you damaged goods? Do you feel unworthy?
You don’t have to remain that way, regardless of your past or your present.
Was that ever me?
You betcha!
Read on…
Hollow. Pure loneliness. Dark, like a bottomless pit. Ripping in my chest. Piercing my heart. Again, he stays out all night. Overcome by torment. Abandonment accompanies me. Consumed with depression, isolation wraps itself around me. My mind races with wild imaginations of where he has gone, what he is doing, and with whom.
Instead of going to bed to sleep, I am wearing a hole in the couch. Every time a car approaches, I spring like a jack-in-the-box, peeking out the window, hoping he has returned. With every disappointment, my stomach turns into knots. My own sobs mock me until I cry myself to semi-consciousness. Hideous lies will follow after he returns and add to my anguish and emotional decline.
Broken. Flawed. Undone.
That was me back then, living with a cheating husband. His words, like rubbing alcohol poured over fresh wounds, stung!
There were no quick fixes. No bandages for emotional wounds. I sank deeper and deeper into a dark abyss, convinced I was beyond repair. For years, that was my reality.
But I know now, it didn’t have to be.
So what was the problem?
I was overwhelmed by abuse—physical, verbal, and emotional. My self-esteem was nonexistent. My sense of worth? Gone.
I believed the lies about who I was and what I deserved. I convinced myself this was just my life, my portion, my fate. I had seen the cycle before in my own family, yet somehow I couldn’t recognize it in myself.
“I made him mad again… maybe I deserved it.”
That’s what I told myself.
That’s what co-dependency sounds like.
How do you see yourself?
Have you been lied to? Torn down? Made to feel small and insignificant?
Do you feel like you’re drowning, gasping for air but never quite reaching the surface?
Maybe you’ve been trying so hard to please someone else that you’ve lost yourself in the process, compromising your values, your peace, your health, your identity.
Enough.
Do not allow someone else’s brokenness to rob you of your joy or harden your heart.
You are worthy.
You are valuable.
You matter.
There is nothing wrong with being fragile, but be like fine china: delicate, yet precious and worth protecting.
You are not damaged goods.
You are not disposable.
You are not a forgotten memory.
Do not become someone’s victim because you believed their lies.
I am living proof: God does not discard what He intends to restore.
Get up.
Rediscover yourself.
Feel your wrist, do you feel that? A pulse?
Then you still have purpose.
Allow God’s hand to lift you, to place you in higher places. He will wipe your tears and gently restore what was broken inside you.
If He brought me out of the pit, He can bring you out too.
But it takes a decision—a made-up mind—to believe that today can be the beginning of something new.
What’s in your hands?
What’s in your heart?
A dream?
A gift?
A child?
You have something worth fighting for.
Choose your battles wisely, but don’t give up the fight for yourself.
If you don’t know my pain, you may never understand my praise.
But my praise? It was born from surviving what tried to destroy me.
From Heart to Heritage
Reflections From the Heart 