Self-esteem issues stemming from childhood. How to get over them?

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I have Dyspraxia and when I was at school I felt really isolated and inadequate. I guess I was a bit strange, socially awkward and I made a lot of daft mistakes that weren’t really my fault. It really hurt my self-image, and I felt I couldn’t do anything right and I was made out to be a bad kid by my teachers and a loser by my peers. I was called a tramp, a retard, stupid. I was left out a lot of things and rejected.

I still feel as though I never escaped that and I believe I still live my life feeling the same as I did as a kid. I bury it all deep down and I think its turned me bitter, selfish and not very trusting.

I have anxiety and have had suicidal thoughts since I was a kid. I just want to feel better. Somehow I made it into University. I feel if I don’t change how I am now then it will be too late and I never will.

Category: Tags: asked May 11, 2013

1 Answer

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It is never too late for anything. But you are right, life is too long for pain and misery if it can be helped! :-)

First of all, I need you to keep in mind that you did not "somehow make it into university". You MADE it into university! This means that by any standard of measurment, you are borderline genius! :-) Most people do not go to university at all! Hell, many people do not even finish high school! And yet, you have already beaten all of them!

Secondly, I want you to know that what you say here fits much of my experience from my own late childhood and adolescence. I suddenly lost all my friends and I never was much of a looker, so girls never took much interest in me, and midways my mother and us kids moved, and thus had to change schools. So, yeah, I know how it is to not fit in. I can't even drink alcohol (medical thing, not religion etc) so while I am happy about that now (I am 22 and in university myself), it sucked kind of big time back when you had to drink to fit in.

Part of my way of dealing with these kinds of things is sumed up like this: "Fuck it at the right times". It sounds like it is easy to say and hard to do, but with practice you will manage to not give a shit about what others think of you. Eventually you will be able to keep yourself going, no matter what. This is by no means the complete recepie for how to manage life, but it is a good place to start (it was for me, anyways) to just not care all that much what others think. I have my thing to do, they have their's. And on the plus side, most of the people worth having lasting, loyal or romantic relationships with, will by far prefer someone who can fend for themselves rather than be in constant need of attention and affirmation.

This all means that you are well on your way to really nailing life, in my book at least. You have just been thrown into the deep end of the pool first. Just for good nerdy measure, you, I and we who struggle this way, are just playing life in "hard mode", it hurts, it sucks at times, it is much more difficult than it seems to be for those around us, but damn do we get the best loot once we find our way! :-D

Keep your head high, and never give up! Ghini