Validation had killed my creative mind.

I had never been validated so much in my entire life. I stepped into the office for an interview, I was praised for thinking ‘differently’. I splurted out an everyday conversation in Arabic and I was a God. I wrote my first blog, it had no English errors, oh. my. god! This dude is a legend. And I started believing I was.

That belief killed me. The fact that I had no writing to compete with ruined me. Praise left and right made me feel like I didn’t need to improve. And so my progress stopped. deteriorated.

Two months later and I’m sitting in the marketing agency translating an English blog into Arabic and I’m stuck on the word “showroom”, I take five minutes to sift through an Arabic dictionary, I find the word, I forcefully insert it into the sentence and I realize — I’ve actually forgotten the grammatical rules of the language. I’m stooped.

But I still didn’t wake up from my slumber of ignorance. My Arabic content started getting rejected and my English blogs, although somehow unbelievably still unique in my office were such so that a new trainee managed to write blogs just as well with the use of a simple thesaurus. Was I really special at all?

My self-esteem dropped. I felt that the money I earned was forbidden upon me. And at the same time (maybe it was linked? it probably was actually) I started losing validation from the place that used to shower me with it. I was no longer the highlight of a convo in my office and my views weren’t valued as much as they once were. And I began to sink to the very lowest version of a human that one could be.

I became the creep that sought validation.