There’s nothing I need to do to earn love or respect.

A surgeon earns something across fifteen years that a newborn already has in full, and only one of the two is a verdict on work. The other is simply being spoken to as a person, and it was never put out to tender.

The exhausting mistake is treating the second as though it ran on the rules of the first. Performing constantly for something that was never conditional. It produces very hard-working adults who are quietly certain that one bad month would end their standing with everyone they know.

Nothing you did got you the baseline. Which is also why nothing you do can lose it.