Distorted Reflection

[andrewducker]

I have a fairly large chunk of self-confidence. Which isn't to say that I think I'm perfect - I have plenty of people around who will happily put me straight if I veer too far in that direction - but I do think that I'm fairly interesting, smart and fun to be around (if you're my kind of person - I'm probably not much fun to be around if you're into football, eastenders and gangsta rap).

Anyway, I'm fairly confident in my own general goodness. I don't need reassuring on this, partially because I get enough general background levels of reassurance and partially because other people's opinions don't actually matter a hell of a lot to me when it comes to matters of aesthetics - _I_ like me.

What baffles the hell out of me is why people that seem obviously cool to me - smart, funny, interesting people, who are capable, creative, fun and generally froody, _aren't_ self-confident. They need other people to tell them that they're worth knowing. They need reassurance. They don't believe, deep down, that they're good people.

Ed pointed out yesterday (yeah, this was the other conversation we had. Well, we chatted a lot about a wide variety of silly things, but I don't tend to catalogue silliness most of the time) that people look at themselves and see faults. That a cool person looking in the mirror may see nothing but the faults they have, much in the same way that an anorexic may look in the mirror and think "If I was just a stone lighter..." when they're already a bag of skin and bones.

So, all you people with low self esteem - why is it that you feel that you're a bad person? Do you think that you are undeserving? Or that you are deserving, but that the world will never recognise that? What do you need reassurance about? What would make you believe that you were good?

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I have an amount of self-love and self-hate and can horribly catapault between the two. Yesterday being a prime example, with too little sleep _everything_ made me want to scream and just run. The most ridiculous of things can make me intensely angry, self-loathing and self-pitying and the most obvious of nice things can be taken cynically to such an extent that I tell people not to compliment me. I personally prefer the insults. I can deal with the insults. I don't know how to deal with the compliments.

In some ways this is getting better, mostly by knowing when I'm doing it and why I'm doing it and how ridiculous it is.

Mostly it's about paranoia, caused by bullying in school and a complete lack of self-confidence that's fallen to specific areas of lack of self-confidence after many years.
I know I'm smart, witty and charming. Perhaps too sarcastic, but sarcasm was the form of comedy that I came about which I found made people laugh with me and like me and I cannot put it down, even when I know it annoys people intensely and pushes them away.

So, I feel that I'm a good person (although by your terms only; by the terms of heron61 I can be quite the opposite of a "good" person), but my being a good person is defined by constantly being the person that is outwardly perceived as a good person. When I'm making people laugh I am a good person, the second I stop and I'm not the centre of attention and I'm not entertaining and someone else is the good person I become a bad person and assume that my lack of being entertaining moves me into being boring and unworthy simply by sitting silently seconds after stopping all conversation by making everyone laugh. The good is very transient, the bad is everything that's not good. Bit black and white really. Annoying.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

I can totally sympathise with the loving/loathing thing. I do that, and suffer from 'black and white' thinking also.

Today, for example, I feel pretty shitty. Logically it's the crap diet and probably still the aftereffects of a very heavy Friday night, but I hate that I haven't given up drinking as I was going to, I hate that I cannot stop eating the crap they put in front of me and that I haven't, despite the facilities being on my doorstep, go into going to the gym/cycling/swimming. There's probably a bit of hormonal disturbance to throw in the mix too.

Basically, I always find myself disappointing. I'm never as good at things as I would like, and I cannot enjoy things that I'm crap at (well except maybe dancing, as I truly consider that a lost cause). I expect other people to have similarly high standards for themselves too, and am always amazed at how people can just smile at themselves being bad at stuff and not seem to care.

oh, I'm just in a bad mood, it's all so tedious, no doubt it will all seem different some other day.

I tend to see myself as good though, just lazy and totally undisciplined.