You have spent much of your life feeling like a failure, or a half-failure. That is because you think of life in terms of success or failure and because you have let the looks and words of others be the measure of you, you who are beyond measure, you who are measureless, you who are inestimable. There is no yard stick to reach the breadth and depth of you.

Somebody else tailored a coat for you, not to fit you, but for you to fit.

Most likely the world at large and your immediate world have put a coat on you that is too tight, and you have thought something was wrong with you because the sleeves were too short or too long, and the collar the same, an unfitting coat.

A mold was made of you that was inaccurate and inadequate, and you twisted and bent to try to fit into it and hide your discomfiture. You thought you had to comply. You thought something was the matter with you when, all the while, it was the standards imposed on you, a loving child of God.

What matter the A's and B's in school now, or the C's and D's? Who remembers them? You hardly do. How much glory are they now?

But you have never forgotten the marks these made on you. You were squeezed with dismay or swelled with pride. You have kept the dismay intact and the pride lingers as a once sweet thing. What a fragile medal was pinned on you only to disappear while shades of demerits continue to hang on you!

Do you see how you have let the past cling to you? You held a certain position in your family or school, and you lived up to it or you didn't, and you are still trying to fulfill that role and to please those you could never please before.

They were mistaken. They mistook you for someone else, and so you let yourself be bought and sold. You traded your heart for someone's estimation of you. You didn't know what else to do then.

What matters now is that you are a free agent, and you do not need to be bound by the past.

You do not have to prove anything. You do not have to prove you are wonderful. You do not have to prove that you are not. You do not have to prove you are a success. You do not have to prove you are not. You never have to say to yourself or anyone in the world: "See, you were right." Or, "See, you were wrong." Prove not yourself nor anyone else right or wrong. Let that go.

Lift up the past and give it to the clouds furling in the sky. Let the past and its clouds pass by.

A stamp was put on you, and it never was valid. It was a fake all along. But you are real, and you are viable, and you are tender, and now you can leap forward and you can jump tall, not for someone else to look at you, but for you and for Me, just Us, just the two of Us Who are really One, for Our heart's sake and not for how someone sees Us at all.

Feel less the need to achieve. What do you achieve when you achieve? Achieving is racing ahead of yourself for something that you don't quite hold, even when you capture it. Once gained, it eludes you. Now elude the need for achievement. Does that thought allow you to breathe? When you have raced ahead to achieve, you have left yourself behind. Pick up yourself now and rise to the greatness that is within you and not to a package outside.