You Were Always Enough
What the Blackfoot Teach About Worthiness
I lost my mom on June 12.
There’s no soft way to say that. It cracked something open in me—and slowed everything down.
For the last month, my weekends have looked completely different.
Where I used to spend every Friday evening, Saturday morning, and most of Sunday hustling for this space—for my romance author life and everything that goes with it—I’ve spent those same hours with my sister instead. Grieving. Laughing. Cleaning. Planning. Unlearning and relearning.
Maybe that’s why this article hit me so hard. Because in the stillness of loss, something ancient surfaced. And my sister and I—between the spreadsheets and the candle lighting and the wine-fueled conversations (sometimes heavy, sometimes heated, often hilarious)—have been circling around the same questions again and again:
Who taught us what we’re worth?
And what if they were wrong?
In the article, Ravilochan shares how Maslow—known for his hierarchy of needs—spent time in 1938 with the Siksika (Blackfoot) people. What he witnessed there was a worldview radically different from the one he came from. Where Maslow believed self-actualization was something we achieved, the Blackfoot understood it as something we already are.
Their word for a fully developed human being—niita’pitapi—doesn’t carry the weight of striving or climbing or earning. It’s not about arriving somewhere at the top of a pyramid. It’s about drawing out what’s already sacred within.
Ryan Heavy Head, a Blackfoot scholar, described it like this:
“In Western culture, you earn a degree after proving yourself. In Blackfoot culture, it’s like you’re credentialed at the start. You’re treated with dignity for that reason—but you spend your life living up to it.”
That sentence hit me like a wave.
How many of us have lived entire decades trying to earn our right to be seen? To be trusted? To be believed in?
I know I have.
Especially as a queer, neurodivergent woman with an invisible disability, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to prove I’m enough. That I’m not too much or too little. That I belong in the room. That I’ve done the work.
But this Blackfoot perspective flipped something in me. What if we are already worthy? What if no one needs to hand us dignity, because we were born with it?
That kind of worldview would change everything. How we lead. How we teach. How we date, lead, create, and heal.
And honestly? It would change how I speak to myself.
Because the hustle voice—the one that tells me to do more, try harder, push through—is still in there. I can hear her even now, whispering that this time of grief is indulgent. That I’m falling behind. That I should be producing more.
But this month with my sister, with all its tears and toasts and tenderness, is teaching me something else:
Sometimes you don’t need to get back to work. Sometimes you need to come back to yourself.
Let’s talk. Can you remember a moment in your life when someone treated you like you were already whole? Not because you earned it—but just because you were. What would change if you believed that, too?
I came across an article recently that stopped me in my tracks. It’s called “The Blackfoot Wisdom That Inspired Maslow’s Hierarchy” by Teju Ravilochan, and it shook loose something in me—something ancient and aching and deeply hopeful. For the rest of July, I want to sit with it and share some of the questions it stirred. The article explores how Abraham Maslow’s famous theory of human needs may have been deeply influenced by his time with the Blackfoot Nation, and how Indigenous worldviews offer a radically different understanding of wholeness, community, and worth. It’s given me so much food for thought—about how we live, what we believe about ourselves and each other, and what it might mean to belong. This post is the second in that series.
