People’s verdicts on you swing wildly. Some treat you like trash; some treasure you. The same is true of your work and your plans. So none of those verdicts can be the thing your value rests on. The deciding vote is the one you cast: “how you treat yourself determines your value.”

Innocent learned it twice. Someone called his writing “useless thoughts” — then others treasured the same pages. Nothing about the work had changed; only the reader had. Later, someone he trusted trashed his life’s vision and walked away.

What he does with that second wound is the quiet turn: he reads the rejection as distance, not proof. Seeing how far someone stands from your vision tells you where you are, the way a fall tells you how high you were. The contempt still hurts. It just doesn’t get to decide your worth.