Your talent is on loan. The interest you pay is using it for someone besides yourself.

Ability arrives as a gift you did not arrange, handed out for reasons that had nothing to do with merit. Treating it as private property turns it into something you have to guard and prove, which is exhausting and slightly beside the point. Something given is meant to move. The interest you owe is spending it on somebody besides yourself.

Name what you are good at, honestly, with none of the false modesty. Find one use for it this month that helps a person who cannot repay you. Teach the younger kid, fix the thing, play at the service, edit a friend’s essay.