Giving up Self Esteem.

Amazon has just sent me a list of their hot new books, one being, “Overcoming Low Self Esteem.” There is a simple, if paradoxical, answer to this implied question. ‘You’re not that important.’ One’s low self-esteem is in fact only the recognition of one’s abject failure to reach the dizzying heights of one’s own high self-esteem. It is after all only you who have posted the tenets of success and failure on a billboard that follows you around like the Mona Lisa’s stare. Think about it; she may have just been staring vacantly into space wondering what to cook for tea, and your billboard just the crazy jottings of a teenager’s harridan. I was the worst moto-cross racer in history but nothing appertaining to this fact appeared on my billboard, even when I was so slow in one race I nearly lead the pack into the first corner of the next. Mothermouse is the first to remind me I in fact suffer from obsessively high self-esteem. This is not true. I just have such low levels of self-importance that I continually transcend my own expectations. When I strode out to face a group on a course, clad in little more than my own honesty, and they all laughed my immediate assumption was I had pleased them with a nonchalant pose. Humiliation doesn’t come easy to us sufferers of OCSE, not least because I have trouble spelling it. And that in large part is from my parents saying, ‘so long as you just try your best.’ By never telling me what my best ‘aught’ to be I was free to just focus on trying, irrespective of the result. So if you do suffer from low self-esteem don’t talk yourself up with messages of ‘I CAN do this’, far better to say, ‘What the hell, I’m only human’ and keep just trying to do the best you can.