By Ellen Reed, an advanced practice nurse, grief/loss therapist, and author of "Someone to Watch Over You: Finding Your Strength Within."This is a contributor-submitted Voices piece. Want to join the conversation? We invite you to write for us. Learn how to share your voice here.

As we proceed through our lives, most of us honor a desire to be productive and useful to ourselves and others. Along the way, we earn respect and recognition, the byproduct of being authentic, credible, and competent not only in what we do, but also in the creation of a well-defined self. This requires setting goals and tasks that further elaborate guiding principles and engaging qualities. It includes acknowledging the reality of circumstances, events, and losses including accepting idiosyncrasies that make us unique. In accomplishing this, it is possible to be loving and grateful individuals aiming to formulate relationships with loving people. How then, is it possible that so many of us wake up each morning feeling tired, bored, and questioning our value and worth?

It suddenly struck me that despite my being one of those individuals Maslow’s theory describes as a self-actualized human being — a person with all the ducks in order to feel safe, secure, properly loved and belonging — all this personal work needs to be put to good use. It is not acceptable to me to be in a state of inertia without a purpose or a goal or a timeline to meet. A surge of awareness, combined with feelings and concerns, amounted to a frightening recognition that our world is falling apart around us and that my personal goals don’t matter unless we get the rest of the world right. Whether we realize it or not, all that you see on TV or read in the news has a potential impact on the person you are in the present.

I hope you are with me on this journey, because my intuition tells me it will take each of us to invest a piece of ourselves in creating reasonable change to assure the continuation of our world — not the “new normal” as some have coined it — but unadulterated change. This means we can no longer expect to survive if we keep acting the way we did. This is especially so if our actions include accepting ideologies that have little merit in improving the human condition.

So here go the cliches. It may mean stepping out of our comfort zone and committing ourselves to an opinion and a belief, not being part of a problem, but part of the solution, as they say. It may take some of us reevaluating the whole of our beliefs about people we relied upon, including those we invited to be our leaders. We actually may need to acknowledge that it is no longer ok to accept things that are not ok.

So, I ask you to describe your world as you know it and then to define who you are in the context of that world. Who is it you want to be? And exactly what will your unique contribution be to make the world a better place?