[luv]

Originally Posted by keg in kc

To add my own color to this, speaking as someone who's had extremely low self-esteem his entire life, when conversations like this get going, it always strikes me just how little people actually understand what's going on in my head. Now, I can't speak for this guy, but I can speak from my own experience, and maybe the number one most misunderstood thing with my self-esteem is that it has anything at all to do with how other people see me. It actually doesn't. It has to do with how I see myself and where that kicks in with my social difficulties is just assuming that everyone else sees the same thing (aka 'projection'). It's hard to explain or to verbalize, but it's not so much caring what other people think of me as just expecting other people to realize right away that I'm broken, somehow. Like it's written on my forehead. (In my case it would say "loser" in flashing neon lights - that's the word I most often use to identify myself...). There's really nothing rational about it, it's just how I'm wired, and in the end how other people see me never really even factors into the equation. Hell, I've had people tell me I'm great, that I'm smart and funny and there's so much more I could be doing with my life. But it just rolls off me. Because it's not what I believe. All I can ever see in myself is the things that I identify as 'wrong'.

That's the nutshell version. Be happy those of you whose brains don't work this way...

Took me 37 years, but I'm breaking free from that way of thinking. It's so liberating.