117 lines
7.1 KiB
HTML
117 lines
7.1 KiB
HTML
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<title>Zk | 2013-09-23-self-esteem</title>
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<h1>Zk | 2013-09-23-self-esteem</h1>
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<p>type: post
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title: Self Esteem
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date: 2013-09-23
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slug: self-esteem</p>
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<hr />
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<p>After forgetting my midday pill until almost three, I found last night’s anxiety
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slowly welling back up inside of me. I was awoken at 1:20 or so in the middle
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of a panic attack, snapping awake as one would from a nightmare, though the
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dream itself had been rather pleasant. I didn’t make it back to sleep until
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nearly four, once the panic had subsided. Despite the lack of sleep, I did
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fairly well this morning, though that all caught up with me in the early
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afternoon.</p>
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<p>I took the pill and decided to walk the dogs a little early so that I could
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change contexts and locations while I waited for the Lorazepam to kick in. For
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the first three quarters of a mile or so, I did my best to practice various
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forms of walking meditation - counting steps, breathing evenly, letting thoughts
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have their place and just pass through like clouds; stuff I’d learned in high
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school - mostly as a defense mechanism so that I would not dwell on things, as I
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know I do when I’m anxious.</p>
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<p>After that, I spent the rest of the walk dissecting how I had felt and what was
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making me anxious, and why. I tried to keep my thoughts organized by thinking
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slowly and repeating the thoughts to myself in words afterward to be sure that I
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understood them (which worked only so well, as I didn’t record them anywhere).</p>
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<p>I have a few things that trigger anxiety in my life, right now, and I think that
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a lot of them have their roots in self-esteem. When I get anxious about
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relationships, such as over the last few weeks, I tend to feel jealousy. The
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type of jealousy that I feel is rooted in a feeling of being redundant in a
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situation where feeling unique is important. </p>
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<p>This hit very strongly over the last few weeks, and the reason it came up has to
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do with how I make polyamory work inside my head: each person in our lives plays
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specific roles for us and fulfills specific needs. Things work out in my
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relationships because each of us fills a different set of needs for each other.
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This caused an internal clash for me when a partner started getting closer to
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someone rather like myself. The clash arose because I have, throughout life,
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reduced myself in my mind to a few simple states, and, while I may be important
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to people for reasons other than those states, loved for facets other than what
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I have reduced myself to, I can’t necessarily make myself believe it.</p>
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<p>The take away from this is, I think, to explore the ways in which I fit into my
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partners’ lives and work on improving a more holistic view of myself. I am not
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just a small collection of interests, but something more complete and I need to
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trust that that is what is loved, and not just some singular facet, whether or
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not there are needs that I’m fulfilling that others do not. I am still a firm
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believer that the more one loves, the more one is able to love, and the last few
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weeks have been such a hellhole that I stopped loving myself, and stopped being
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able to internalize that concept as well.</p>
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<p>Similar thoughts have cropped up around work. The project has gone skittering
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from focus to focus without settling down long enough for us to even come up
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with an adequate roadmap. This has us all a little on edge, but given my past
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experiences with things like this getting out of hand, I feel incredibly
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anxious about this. The way in which this ties into self esteem is that I feel
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as though I must constantly prove to myself and others that I really know what
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I’m doing. This has always been a common theme: proof of competence. It’s hard
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to feel competent when upper management’s actions come off as schizophrenic,
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however, and so as that control is yanked from under me, I feel inadequate to
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complete even the simplest task, though I don’t (logically) think that’s the
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case.</p>
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<p>The take away from this is more difficult. I could, like my coworkers, just roll
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with the changes and drop whatever I was doing at each hairpin and pick up the
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new task without comment. I haven’t been doing that, I’ve been trying to voice
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my opinion that we need to keep up our steady progress toward a goal - after
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all, agile does not mean schizophrenic. That hasn’t been working that well,
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though, and I don’t want to simply be a mid-level engineer all my life, so I’m
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wondering if I need to find some way to be more politic about things without
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necessarily feeling bad that I’m not accomplishing everything in half the time
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with flying colors or whatever.</p>
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<p>Finally, since all my examples seemingly have to come in threes, my projects
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have been suffering due to the low opinion I hold for my own work. [a][s]
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in particular has languished somewhat as I’ve struggled to write something that
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I feel is worthwhile. I have grand ideas and I feel that I’m not a good enough
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writer or not smart enough to actually pull them off. My pride, however, won’t
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let me just drop them, and so I’m stuck in this tension between wanting to
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improve my writing and researching, but feeling like a failure about it in the
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first place.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure what the best take-away from this is, other than to just buckle
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down and hammer one out, accepting that it won’t be as good as I envision it in
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my mind. In fact, that’s what I used to do, all the time. This is the biggest
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reason that I feel like the root of a lot of these ancillary symptoms of anxiety
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is low self-esteem. Even things that I don’t necessarily feel anxious about,
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such as [a][s]. I know that I don’t need to feel grand about myself and all
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the things I do in life all of the time but I’m curious: problems have been
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piling up, and if there is one root cause with one (obviously complex) solution,
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then I think it’s worth looking into. Even if the solution comprises several
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individual solutions unique to each resulting problem - exploring the depths of
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my relationships, being more politic at work while still getting stuff done, and
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writing the articles I need rather than the ones I want - in order to up the
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self-esteem, then I think it’s worth doing.</p>
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