The Horrible Link Between Low Self-Worth and Being “Low-Maintenance”
If I can’t be liked, I can at least be useful.
I had a lot of self-esteem and self-worth issues growing up. When I was in grade school, I was a reasonably self-assured kid, but when I got to middle school, a bunch of things happened at once that destroyed that. For one, I was shifted to a new school and put in a classroom without any of my friends. If the shock of being suddenly surrounded by strangers wasn’t enough, my bipolar started to manifest as well.
That double-whammy was what ultimately contributed to my shift from a kid with reasonably-high self-esteem to a jaded middle schooler who had negative self-worth. Any sense of myself as a worthwhile human being was destroyed by the ostracization of my peers and the onset of my mental illness.
One interesting upshot of this was that, in my teens and twenties, I sought a sense of self-worth from making myself useful. I was the guy who showed up twenty minutes early to the party to help set up and stayed late to break down. Whenever someone needed something — a drink, something in another room, anything — I was the one to step and fetch.
In an odd twist, this is how I decided to go by “Matthew” instead of “Matt.” I had held a convenience store door open for someone and got caught holding it open for about a minute and a half while various people took advantage of my kindness. A friend who was with me at the time laughed and called me “door Matt.” I decided that this was unacceptable and began going by “Matthew” shortly thereafter.
However, this is a theme that I have seen in a lot of people I know. Being an awkward, nerdy type, I tend to attract similar types of people. Among my various friends that had similar experiences to me, many if not most of them have the drive to be useful over anything. These are people who were the weirdos and outcasts in school, and as a result, feel the urge to make themselves useful if nothing else.
Unfortunately, this is often the result of a self-perpetuating cycle as a child and teen. Whether from school influences, parental pressure, or other influences, people like me have come to have low self-worth and self-esteem. Somewhere along the line, we gained the impression that being “low maintenance” was our only redeeming quality.
Now that we have become adults, this has caused us to feel massive amounts of guilt around asking for anything for ourselves, no matter how minor, because that would negate what we view as our only redeeming feature: that we don’t ask for things. We have either been conditioned, conditioned ourselves, or both, to think of ourselves as “the person who doesn’t ask for things,” and as such simply don’t assert ourselves when we need something.
Because we feel that we are unlikeable, we settle for being low-maintenance. As such, we do what we can to make ourselves useful whenever possible. People like people who help, so to be liked, we help. If we can’t be liked, we can at least be useful.
I still struggle with self-esteem and self-worth issues. For as much good as I do with my job and as much as my friends reassure me that I am a worthwhile human being, I don’t feel that way. I generally do my best to be useful to the people around me, whether that’s providing emotional support, lending money, or providing physical assistance with moving or cleaning. Beyond that, I don’t really consider myself to have much worth beyond “I help people.”
Heck, my therapist had to teach me about self-compassion to get me to consider my own feelings at all. The amount of energy I devote to others because I want to be helpful often dwarfs the amount of energy I dedicate to caring for myself, and I will often destroy my own mental health to help someone else.
Honestly, I wish I had a good solution for how to cope with this, but I don’t. I do my best to practice self-compassion and self-care, but I’ve spent so much time being useful at my own expense that I don’t know anything else. The best thing I can offer is to try to recognize when you are over-extending yourself for others and, if possible, stop to take care of yourself for a minute (or preferably a few days, if you’re anything like me).
Sadly, I am fairly certain a lot of people will identify with this mentality, so if you do, know that you’re not alone. I seem to have attracted a pile of people who do this, so there are quite a few of us in the world. And, as I said above, try to take some time to care for yourself instead of others. If you can be useful to anyone, be useful to yourself and take a break. You deserve it as much as anyone.
If you liked this, please subscribe to my publication, Thing a Day. I publish something every day on a variety of topics, so you never know what you’re going to see!
Here are some other things I’ve written:
