2024/03/29

For the longest time, for at least six years, I have had extremely low self-esteem. This low self-esteem prevents me from giving value to my own actions, and feeling proud and accomplished. I have been placing the value of myself in the hands of people I interact with. My own opinion about myself is inherently biased, and therefore inaccurate and false. I can give myself any value I want, but there is no point to. The actual value is given from the outside, by other people. If other people give me no value, then I have no value at all.

However, I am surrounded by people whom I am deeply afraid to communicate with.

I view other people as self-sufficient entities. They do not need me in their life, because they did not need me before we ever first interacted. Therefore, my presence can be viewed by them as an interference, a foreign object, an unneeded phenomenon, without which their life would be normal and acceptable, as it always has been.

As such, I assume that I am in this position by default.

This creates a struggle deep within myself. I cannot feel happy without being told that I am worth something by others. At the same time, I assume that I am not welcome by others, and that I am worth worse than nothing by default.

This struggle is never truly resolved, and I can only chip away at its weak points. By figuring out what exactly adds worth to me in their eyes, I can focus on enacting such things.

Yet this position is full of pitfalls. The most common way of achieving value in the eyes of others is to be a good company for them. This entails topics, whether discussional or artistic.

By engaging with the person on any particular topic, this topic can be either something I am interested in, or something they are interested in.

In the first case, when I am talking about my own topic, I am constantly perceiving the other person as bored, as annoyed, as someone who was perfectly content before I started talking. Just like I myself have no default value for the person, my topics don't have any default value either.
If the person does not respond, then it is evident that they are not interested in the topic at all, which means that I am wasting their time, which means I have no value. If the person changes the topic without responding, then it is not evident, but confirmed. My words are worthless to them and I should stop immediately.
If the person does respond, then I think that they are merely being nice. That they are aware of the possible mental process described in the previous paragraph, and decide to give some sort of feedback to me. But this feedback feels forced. It feels like it stems from good manners, not from genuine appreciation of the topic I am subjecting them to. That they are being patient with me. And this means that eventually, if I keep behaving like this, this patience will run out, and it will be revealed that my value has been worse than none all along.

In the second case, when I am talking about their own topic, I instantly get the feeling of being an impostor. I have inherently less knowledge, less appreciation for the topic, and now I am on the other end of the scenarios described in the first case, above. The person has power over me now. I am a foreigner in their village that they have lived in for years. I may show my appreciation in a way that is incompatible with that of the person, in a way that feels incredibly fake, forced, uninformed. Worse than that, my attempts at indulging in their topic themselves may be seen as an intrusion on sacred grounds I have no business being on.
If I think the person expects me to sing along with them, I do so. Yet when I sing, they stop singing. As if the melody I sang was so worthless that the person would rather interrupt their own enjoyment than indulge in my way of handling their topic. I get this feeling every time I join a conversation and finding the conversation dead as soon as I do. I am killing people's enjoyment. My actions have no good value.

If the conversation does not die, I assume that whatever I have just said was ignorable. That the topic can live without my input, and I have just barely avoided the scenario described in the previous paragraph. Nonetheless, I should stop my behavior lest I eventually fail to avoid the scenario.

I feel the glare of people on me. My input is not welcome by default, and any reaction to it is, by default, disgust, wrapped in various degrees of good manners.

However, what happens if all of the above fails, and I am convinced that the person genuinely accepts my presence? That they really give me value?

I feel incredibly good. I have proof that I have value. I can cite someone on this now. But for a fleeting moment. Because in an hour, in a day, in a week, it resets back to the beginning.

I cannot live just on one achievement. If I have one action that gave me value, I cannot keep repeating it, because every repeat diminishes its value. It's even possible that this action can only ever have value when performed just once. So I have to keep going.

And every time I keep going, I go through the entire process again. I feel that I risk it all every time. No matter how much praise I got yesterday, the lack of any of it today tells me that I no longer have value. And then it either ends tragically, or cycles back again, for another chance to end tragically.

I struggle to achieve a permanent feeling that I have value on my own. I struggle to achieve a permanent feeling that I have value in the eyes of others. I am worthless by default from all angles, and I resist every attempt at contradicting that. My only hope is to stop being able to resist.