The Bitter Lesson I Learned When I Secretly Hated Myself
Many times, things are not what they seem.
I have a beggar friend, and I help him financially every week with a small amount of money.
As a result of our peculiar friendship, he has been telling me details of his life.
He married very young and had two children with his wife. The wife became a gambler, met someone else at a Bingo, and after a couple of years of cheating on him, she left my friend.
He went into a depression, lost custody of his children, became an alcoholic, and, to top it all off, developed a severe mental illness.
My friend always tells me
“If you don’t want to end up like me, the most important thing you have to do is take your self-esteem seriously. I thought that was bullshit, but when someone steals your self-esteem, little by little you lose your dignity, and itis you yourself who ends up destroying your own life”.
My friend is right. And I don’t forget it because he also says, “We’re all just a stroke of bad luck away from ending up on the street.”
He knows this well. When tragedy knocks on your door, everything you have can drain in months.
That’s why I want to share the most bitter lesson I learned from hating myself for years so that you can protect your self-esteem and not end up like my friend or like I almost did.
The bitter lesson: Not having hope ends up robbing you of your self-esteem.
The line between enjoying life and evading not to think about the future is thin.
It’s a mistake I paid dearly for.
I had no direction in my life. I didn’t believe I had a future. I didn’t think it was possible to achieve anything.
My mother, who didn’t have it easy, always told me, “Get a job. Do whatever it takes. Don’t argue with the boss. We poor people have to put up with it.” And I did. And I swallowed, I swallowed too many complaints and humiliations (I don’t blame my mother; it was me who consented to all that) just as I had eaten the humiliations and insults from the other kids at school.
As a consequence, I had no life plan beyond partying and trying to snatch a little fun out of life.
And that ended with my dignity, and I ended up starting a process of personal self-destruction that I have talked about in other articles. At the age of 33, I hit rock bottom.
One of the things I discovered when I hit rock bottom was that I hated myself.
I had swallowed so much bullshit I had bought into it.
I felt ugly, foolish, inadequate.
And I wasn’t. But as you know, and if you shouldn’t, beliefs become your identity, limiting you.
In the end, it is you who says to yourself, “This is for you,” “This is not for you,” “This you can do,” “This you can’t do”. In conclusion, it is you who self-limits, who sabotages yourself.
Understanding this in your heart (not just your mind) changes your life.
Not only your socio-economic circumstances are limiting you, but you are also the one who is excluding yourself and subtracting possibilities because of your lack of self-esteem.
And that is why many entrepreneurs today spend a lot of money going to therapy. Because they know that if they don’t believe they deserve success, they WILL NOT GET IT.
When I realized this, I started to stop wasting time and to have dreams because I’ll tell you one thing: just like you lose weight with exercise and diet, you increase your self-esteem if you see your life moving forward.
I started having dreams. People began to think I was crazy. I didn’t listen. I stuck to my plan. My dreams began to come true, but more importantly, the certainties fed my self-esteem and got me out of the shit.
The importance of certainties
You need three things,
- A goal
- A plan to follow
- And control points (because what you can’t measure, you can’t control).
Do you know what they say? The important thing is not the goal but the path. Well, it is true.
The checkpoints will help you feel good. And that is precisely what you want: to feel good (the path).
Things are different from what they seem: The goal is not the primary objective but the secondary one.
Although this may seem counterintuitive.
A goal is a destination address you put on your life’s GPS. But what you want is not to get lost and that the road is pleasant and has beautiful landscapes :-)
Those certainties you achieve by reaching small checkpoints will gradually make you believe that what you have set out to do is possible for you.
And believing that you can is precisely the key to increasing your self-esteem. Those certainties translate into a sense of accomplishment/duty accomplished: that feeling you get after finishing a puzzle, solving a crossword puzzle, or completing a marathon.
Ergo, the more small certainties you get on your way, the greater your sense of accomplishment will be, and this will improve your self-image and consequently increase your self-esteem and make it much more difficult for you to relapse into self-destructive processes that ruin your life.
A virtual hug
AG
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