Tao and Zen

I was just talking to someone relatively new, in the sense that he is not somebody I've done a lot of talking with in the past. This is one of those cases that happens fairly often where it's odd that we haven't in fact met in person, and if we did meet in person, we would like each other and want to hang out a decent amount, but we haven't met and we are in fact not likely to do so. And I'm okay with that, but at the same time I'm laughing and shaking my head and wondering why life is like that.

One thing I realized in the course of the conversation, which wasn't really about any one thing, was that I have no self esteem. Still. I have none. And I have to ask myself why this is.

Why do I still have trouble believing the good things about myself, despite the evidence? I'm well perceived in my work, I make a good amount of money, I have a lot of love in my life. While I wouldn't say that I have everything I want in my life - there are always new goals to strive for - I certainly have a lot of the things that people, in general, want. So why would I still assume that I am unattractive or undeserving?

Can I blame the mean things that other people have said to me, from childhood on? There are certainly a lot of those. "You're ugly." "You're fat." "You're sick." "You never shut up." "You're disgusting." Are any of those things true? Possibly, for some value of truth. Should they bother me? No. I know better. With the possible exception of "fat", every single one of those judgments heaped on my head is subjective.

On the other hand, one or two of them were said to me by people whom I loved desperately at the time. Well, that's gotta hurt.

I love you.

Well, you're disgusting.

Yeah, that hurts. Of course it hurts. How could it not hurt? But it's not why I have no self-esteem. It'd be easy to think so, but I know better. 99% of the time, I don't believe those things, even when said by someone who is or was important to me.

Ah, but the 1% of the time that I do...it's a very loud percent. And what I think during those times is this:

- I deserve the bad things that have happened to me, and the mean things that people have said, and the terrible things that will surely happen to me in the future.

- I don't deserve any good things. I don't deserve the job I have or the money I make. I don't deserve love from those poor deluded individuals who love me, nor (god forbid), the interest of anyone not currently ensnared by my evil deceptions.

I deserve bad. I don't deserve good. And I have to say, sure there are people in my life, who knowing that I feel this way, have fed the flames. That's not a nice thing to do, to be sure. But I can't blame any of those people for starting the fire. They didn't. At worst, they fanned an existing spark. They had their reasons, perhaps. That's not important.

What is important is that there was something there to flame: not an actual belief that I am bad, or ugly, or whatever, but a belief that to be called those things, and to be denied happiness, is something I deserve. And furthermore, that I have had this belief as long as I can remember. I simply can't remember a time when I can say for sure that I believed, 100%, that I was not somehow a bad person.

Fairly recently I thought to myself that some terrible thing must have occurred, when I was very young, to cause not only this belief but some of the other things that were attendants of my early childhood: consistently terrible nightmares, a certain type of precocity, a level of dissociativeness, an inability to relate to my peers, and so on. I felt that I needed to know if there was such an incident and what it was, so that I could "break my brain" as it were and try to get past whatever it was so that I would no longer feel the vague horror that I always feel when I think about my childhood.

But even more recently, I realized that whatever might have happened, it doesn't matter. There is in fact one thing that I know about that did happen - the fact that my mother almost died giving birth to me - and while it's true that that is certainly horrible, one other thing is true: it wasn't my fault. And I've come to realize that even if some other horrible thing happened to cause the nightmares and the dissociation and so on, that thing would also be very much not my fault. I don't need to know what happened, if indeed anything did. What I need to realize is that I didn't do anything wrong, and have therefore not been deserving of bad things and undeserving of good things as far back as I can remember.

Or ever.