For me, an introvert who was taught that other people’s needs came before mine the problem of self-esteem was a problem of how I imagined other people saw me. Through nature and nurture would judge myself on what I thought others thought of me and of course compare my life with how I imagine others’ lives are. Even if others told me I had value I imagined they were just being nice and didn’t mean it.

I was allowing others, imagined others, to define my self-esteem.

You could say that my sense of self and self-esteem wasn’t based on who I was, the things I did, or the roles I took on but on imagination…. And my imagination sucked. Worse i discovered that apparently people, especially strangers, didn’t actually spend much time thinking about me or caring about my self-esteem that I was giving them power over.

One of the first steps in taking ownership of my self-esteem was coming to terms with what it meant to be an introvert in what I felt/feel is a extroverted world. To much of my self-esteem was tied to being ashamed of being a introvert and not being ‘outgoing’, exciting, a story teller, life of the party…

The following books were helpful as I learned the value of being an introvert and how it opened me to experience the world that could be helpful in my career and relationships.

QUIET: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

I had often been told that I “think too much” and should just accept the things I was told. When I talked about what I was thinking about, a problem I was working through, others heard it as being negative or pessimistic… yet I felt optimistic

Thinking about things is part of my nature as was working through problems by identifying issues and strategies for dealing with them. However these well intention influences were telling me not to me.

In The Positive Power of Negative Thinking by Julie Norem I realized that my thinking too much was not being negative but a strategy. I discovered I was an optimist that believed that when I looked at a problem and worked out the ways things might go wrong I could and would correct those issue and everything would work out. You don’t want a strategic extrovert building your bridges you want a defensive introvert.

I guess I’m saying that my sense of self-esteem improved when took ownership of of my nature and nurture. Instead of imagining who I was I worked at finding and examining my nature and nurture. How I do things had value, who I am has value.

I won’t lie I still dream of being the extrovert that everyone loves (I imagine loves) but at my core that’s not me. However that not being me does not have to have any bearing on my sense of worth..

Anyway I hope you well on your quest for self-esteem and it is a quest as only you can find it and in finding it take ownership of it.

Trust your quest and that it has value because it is your quest! Allow yourself to be the person you are, the good the bad and the ugly. Be you!

In the thirteenth-century legend Quest for the Grail, when the vision of the veiled Grail appears to the knights in Arthur’s banquet hall to summon them each to their quest of unveiling it, the knights decide to ride forth singly, for to go in a group would have been shameful. This is the point which Campbell – the greatest mythologist of this century – holds up as testimony to a new moral initiative that is of the essence of European spirituality.

When all the knights had put on their arms, attended Mass and expressed their gratitude to their king, they ‘entered into the forest, at one point and another, there where they saw it to be thickest, all in those places where they found no way or path …. So they start their journey as individuals, each trusting to their own authority and to the mysterious power of their calling. Jules Cashford

Follow your Path

“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” ― Joseph Campbell

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” ― Joseph Campbell

“As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.” ― Joseph Campbell

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Peter.

I could just play all relaxed like they appear to, or to just play dumb and not do things.

That maybe what is known as a Fool’s Choice – These are false dilemmas that suggest we face only two options (both of them bad), when in fact we face several choices.

You can live your truths as you know them, doing your job the best you can because that is who you are without judging, labeling, comparing or imagining how relaxed others appear to be in how they do there work. All this imagining seems to be the source of much of your frustrating.

This Afternoon I went for a walk to a local coffee shop. A man was nice enough to hold the door open for me however I was preoccupied and didn’t acknowledge him with a thank you. The man in an tone a voice that to me indicated annoyance let me know with a load “Your Welcome”

The man of course could not know I was thinking about my mother who had recently past and instead perhaps imagined I was being rude and would teach me manners by a reminder with the ‘Your Welcome”. Perhaps in that moment he needed validation… Of course in that moment I was also imagining I new what the man intention was.

I won’t lie a part of me was embarrassed for my failure at not being present and angry at the man for pointing it out. So we had a moment that was likely negative for both instead of a moment that was gracious for not real reasons

Maybe we were both right – I was being rude and he was only holding open the door to be noticed for his good manners.
But
What if the man could be happy holding open doors for others, not to be thanked, but because that was who he was?
What if I could be grateful for someone holding open a door for me even in those times I’m not fully present. why should we imagine we “knew” what the other intent was and so change a moment of grace into something else

You are correct this God you created in your mind is not going to help you.
To be clear this god of promises is not the idea of ‘G_d’ I was pointing to.

I’m sorry life has not been kinder to you

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Peter.

I have been reading many of the posts on this site of people asking for advice and something… I don’t know…

Do the stories we tell about an experience eventual become the experience? Do we write our story or does the story end up writing us? Perhaps there is a tipping point that we don’t notice when we surrender and allow the story to define ourselves and our present…

Anyway just a thought I had while reading your post.

I was also reminded of a book I read long ago by David Richo – When the Past is Present
Maybe that is a place for you to start in reclaiming your story and living the life you want to tell.

“Though most of us want to move on from our past, we tend to go through our lives simply casting new people into the roles of key people, such as our parents or any significant person with whom there is still unfinished business.”
― David Richo, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Peter.

Some interesting reading I came across

I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for. – Joseph Campbell

From “An Open Life – Joseph Campbell in Conversation With Michael Toms”

TOMS: Human beings throughout history have been searching for their source. How do you see today’s search?

CAMPBELL: I think our search is somewhat encumbered by our concept of God.

God as a final term is a personality in our tradition, so that breaking past that “personality” into the transpersonal, whether within one’s self or in conceiving of the form beyond forms – although one can’t even say form – is blocked by our orthodox training.

This is so drummed into us that the word “God” refers to a personality.

Now, there have been very important mystics who have broken past that. For instance, there is Meister Eckhart, whose line I like to quote: “The ultimate leave-taking is the leaving of God for God.”

This is what in Sanskrit is so easily expressed in Saguna and Nirguna Brahman – Brahman with qualities and Brahman without qualities. And when people would go to Ramakrishna, he would ask them how they would like to talk about God, with qualities or without? You see, that’s inherent in their tradition, but it’s blocked in ours (Christianity)

TOMS: Many people seem to be coming to the search for God.

CAMPBELL: Well, that’s the great thing about it. As soon as you smash the local provincial god-form, God comes back. And that’s what Nietzsche meant when he wrote that God is dead. Nietzsche was himself not an atheist in the crude sense; he was a man of enormous religious spirit and power.

What he meant was that the God who’s fixed and defined in terms appropriate for 2,000 years ago is no longer so today. And of course the words of Meister Eckhart give an earlier variation of Nietzsche’s remark. So the concept of God beyond God is in our tradition.

TOMS: You have to go beyond traditional concepts, don’t you?

CAMPBELL: Indeed you do. Not only for your own life, but because life is different from the way it was and the rules of the past are restrictive of the life process. The moment the life process stops, it starts drying up; and the whole sense of myth is finding the courage to follow the process. In order to have something new, something old has to be broken; and if you’re too heavily fixed on the old, you’re going to get stuck. That’s what hell is: the place of people who could not yield their ego system to allow the grace of a transpersonal power to move them.

TOMS: So it’s like coming in touch with the deeper part of life and being willing to let go.

CAMPBELL: And if you understand the spiritual aspect of your religious tradition, it will encourage you to do that. But if you interpret it in terms of hard fact, it’s going to hinder you.

Heinrich Zimmer once said, “The best things can’t be told; the second best are misunderstood; the third best have to do with history.” Now, the vocabulary through which the best things are told as second best is the vocabulary of history, but it doesn’t refer to history; it refers through this to the transcendent. Deities have to become, as one great German scholar said, “transparent to the transcendent.” The transcendent must show and shine through those deities. But it must shine through us, too, and through the spiritual things we are talking about. And as long as you keep pinning it down to concrete fact, and declare something isn’t true because it didn’t happen, you’re wrong. We don’t say that about fairy tales, and so we get the truth of them. We should read our religions that way.

CAMPBELL: I think contemporary religion is in a very bad spot. And I think it is because it has taken the symbols as the referents. Religion is the constellation of metaphors, and the metaphor points to connotations that are of the spirit, not of history, as I said before. And in our religions, we’re accenting the historical image that carries the message, but we stay with the image.

TOMS: The literal interpretation, in other words…

CAMPBELL: Yes, and you lose these messages. The thing about Jesus is not that he died and was resurrected, but that his death and resurrection must tell us something about our own spirit.

TOMS: Why do you think we tend to a literal interpretation of Christ in myth?

CAMPBELL: I think it’s the result of a strong institutional emphasis in our religions in the West, and a fear of the mystical experience. In fact, the experience of the divine within you is regarded as blasphemy. I remember having given a lecture once on this problem of becoming transparent to transcendence, so that your life becomes a transparency through which light shines.

I spoke of it as “the god in you, coming out through your life.” A couple of months later, I met a young woman at another talk who had happened to be present at the first one; and she told me that when I had said “The Christ in you asks you to live,” a priest sitting next to her had said, “That’s blasphemy!” So, in institutional religion, all the spirit is out there somewhere, not in you.

But what’s the meaning of the saying, “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” if you can’t say, “It’s within me”? Then who’s in heaven?

TOMS: And, “I and the Father are one.”

CAMPBELL: All of that. Jesus was crucified because he said, “I and the Father are one.” Well, the ultimate mystical experience is of one’s identity with the divine power. That’s the sense of the Chandogya Upanishad saying which says “You are It.” That divinity which you seek outside, and which you first become aware of because you recognize it outside, is actually your inmost being. Now, it’s not a nice thing to say, but it’s not good for institutions if people find that it’s all within themselves. So there may be some point there about our particular situation in the West where religious institutions have been able to dominate a society.

TOMS: In some sense, we create our own gods.

CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s exactly what we do. No matter what name we give it, the God we have is the one we’re capable of having. That’s something people don’t realize. Simply because they’re all saying the same name for God, that doesn’t mean they have the same relationship to That, or the same concept of what It is. And the concept of God is only a foreground of the experience.

TOMS: Isn’t it important to respect our own uniqueness?

CAMPBELL: I think that’s the most important thing of all. That’s why, as l said, you really can’t follow a guru. You can’t ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life – there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.

“One could start just by taking a few minutes out of every day to sit quietly and do nothing, letting what moves one rise to the surface. One could take a few days out of every season to go on retreat or enjoy a long walk in the wilderness, recalling what lies deeper than the moment or the self. One could even try to find a life in which stage sets and performances disappear and one is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions.”

“Going nowhere isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply. ”
― Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

Perhaps a place to start is to take a few minutes every day for yourself to be still and allow the mind to rest.
Creating such a time for yourself will require you to practice creating boundaries as well as space to heal those ”broken legs”.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
T.S Eliot

I have often found myself stuck in my stuckness… similar to being depressed about being depressed, stuck in a loop that kept feeing itself.

Truth be told there is a part of me that is comfortable with the familiarity of my stuckness as it can feel like a safe place to be. When I don’t move there is little risk anything will change, and if something is going to change I want to control it and so be certain… but change is uncertain and feels unsafe… another self-feeding loop of stuckness and fear

“Not being stuck means the learning to be comfortable with uncertainty and not knowing. So whatever first steps you take into uncertainty have to be bearable. You can’t get overwhelmed and yet you do have to embrace movement. Movement is the opposite of being stuck. So find some small steps that are manageable that will add movement.”

If you want out of the cycle you have to move, face the fear and do it anyway. As AL said – experiment, experience, explore and discover and learn…

I found the following book helpful when I asked myself the same question after a simmilar experiance.
How to Be an Adult in Love – Letting love in Safely and Showing it Recklessly by David Richo

“We were made to love and be loved. Loving ourselves and others is in our genetic code. It’s nothing other than the purpose of our lives—but knowing that doesn’t make it easy to do. We find it a challenge to love ourselves. We might have a hard time letting love in from others: recognizing it, accepting it. We’re often afraid of getting hurt. It is also sometimes scary for us to share love with those around us—and love that isn’t shared leaves us feeling flat and unfulfilled.

“I now understand that all the people I have ever known have come into my life to teach me about love. I am coming to trust that every moment of affection I received has been carefully recorded in me, ready for playback. The love I received from others shows me how to love those who need it from me. This is how the people who loved me have helped write this book.
Specific memories also come through about how much people have had to put up with from me. What did they see in me that made them stick with me when I was so damned afraid to return their love? Maybe they saw something lovable in me that I need to see in myself. Their uninterrupted love also helps me trust that I must have shown more love than I give myself credit for.”
― David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

“The grace in dark events does not emerge magically. It can happen only when we join in the forward movements of grace and march into them fully. Then we more easily resurrect ourselves from our catastrophes. Thus, grace is a gift potential in what happens. When it offers itself, it is up to us to take advantage of that offering. We begin to do this when we give up being victims of circumstance, when we honestly ask: “What can I make of what happened? How can I work with this event so that it opens me to something new? How can this serve me and others?” Part of getting to this point is cultivating the trusting attitude “If it happened, it must hold an opportunity.” As Benjamin Franklin said: “The things that hurt instruct.” ― David Richo

“When I see I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I see I am everything, that is love. My life is a movement between these two. —NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ”