You Don’t Have to Endure to Be Worthy

Leticia Francis Author

Candice’s story of worth, forgiveness, and rebuilding love from the inside out—self-awareness, reprogramming, and reinvention in motion.

There’s a moment every woman who’s been through hell faces—the mirror moment. The one where you realize the reflection staring back isn’t just tired, she’s missing.

That’s where Candice found herself.

A high-achieving woman with a glowing résumé and a dimming light, sitting in her fancy apartment with a bottle of vodka in the freezer, wondering how she—the strong one—ended up here.

But the truth is, survival mode doesn’t care how accomplished you are. It doesn’t care how many degrees you have, how impressive your title is, or how big your dreams are.
If your worth was built on being needed instead of being known, you’ll always end up performing for love instead of receiving it.

Candice’s story is about what happens when we chase validation disguised as connection—and how the journey home starts with one radical act: deciding that you’re already enough.

This is her story through the three phases of exiting survival mode—Self-Awareness, Reprogramming, and Reinvention.

Phase 1 — Self-Awareness: Seeing the Pattern for What It Is

Candice didn’t grow up in chaos—she grew up in quiet neglect.
No crime, no starvation, just what she calls “mid-level dysfunction.” Parents who stayed together out of duty, not devotion.
A mother who smiled through misery. A father who provided but never protected emotionally.

Love in that house was a job description, not a feeling.

So Candice learned early: affection is a fantasy, endurance is love, and your worth is measured by what you can tolerate.

That belief shaped everything—from a long, volatile relationship in college to a glittering career in television that left her emotionally bankrupt. When that job ended, her sense of value shattered too.

And into that void walked desperation—the most dangerous matchmaker of all.

She dated a violent ex-con. Then a younger man who assaulted her. And then a narcissist who weaponized intimacy by reading her journals, learning her triggers, and turning her vulnerabilities into ammunition.

Every fight ended the same way: her trying to prove she was enough to make him love her better.

Until one night, standing half-dressed and bruised in the streets of Queens, she heard a truth louder than his insults:
“You don’t have to do this anymore.”

That was the moment she stopped surviving—and started awakening.

Phase 2 — Reprogramming: The Work of Unlearning

Healing isn’t pretty. It’s not crystal baths or mantras whispered into moonlight—it’s sitting in the rubble of your own patterns and asking, “What part of me believes I deserve this?”

For Candice, that meant dismantling everything she thought she knew about love, worth, and womanhood.

Her biggest realization?
She hadn’t just recreated her parents’ relationship—she had inherited her mother’s relationship with herself.

Her mother endured.
Candice excelled.
Different masks. Same wound.

The emotional abandonment of her childhood had quietly become her compass.
Every time someone withdrew, she chased.
Every time someone criticized, she tried harder.
And every time someone withheld love, she mistook it for passion.

Reprogramming meant learning to stop outsourcing her value.
To stop performing for approval.
To stop chasing the version of womanhood that patriarchy and trauma scripted for her.

She entered therapy. Joined a women’s healing circle. And when the facilitator asked her to forgive, Candice balked.
Forgiveness? For them?
After everything?

But what she discovered was a truth deeper than religion ever taught:

“Forgiveness isn’t absolution—it’s self-liberation.”

It’s not saying, you didn’t hurt me.
It’s saying, you no longer own me.

Forgiveness, real forgiveness, is the art of releasing the expectation that the past could have gone differently.
It’s taking your energy back from trying to rewrite someone else’s story and using it to rebuild your own.

Phase 3 — Reinvention: Defining Love on Her Own Terms

Reinvention is the phase most people skip because it demands something terrifying: choice.

Who will you be when you’re no longer reacting to pain?
What does your life look like when peace isn’t conditional?
How do you define love when it’s no longer a rescue mission?

For Candice, reinvention meant devotion.
Not the performative kind—real devotion. The kind that starts with herself.

She created “The Devotion Protocol,” helping other high-achieving women attract emotionally available partners by first becoming emotionally available to themselves.

Because you can’t receive what you refuse to embody.

Reinvention also meant reconciling with her mother—not by rewriting history, but by releasing judgment.
As she puts it:

“When I stopped calling my mother crazy, I stopped living as the daughter of crazy. I became the woman who gets to choose who she is.”

That’s what healing really is—not a destination, but a decision to live differently.

Candice no longer needs to be someone’s wife to feel valuable.
She no longer needs to prove her worth to deserve love.
And she no longer confuses chaos for connection.

She’s not chasing love anymore.
She’s building it—within herself first.

If You’re Reading This and Still in the Cycle

Start here:

• Self-Awareness: Ask yourself, “Whose version of love am I living?”

• Reprogramming: Release the need to be chosen. Choose you first, every damn time.

• Reinvention: Don’t chase the person who hurt you. Build the life that heals you.

Remember: the version of you that settled for crumbs was doing her best with what she knew.
The version of you that’s waking up now?
She’s the one rewriting the story.

You weren’t built to break.
But you damn sure weren’t built to just survive.

Categories: : Podcast