Step One.
Convince yourself that even if you are a Lovecraftian horror, you’re not the single worst Lovecraftian horror on the block. You don’t need to name names, but there’s somebody out there, face-wise, who you would not trade places with. Recognize that no matter how long you stare into the mirror and gingerly, physically, alter your own self-perception, tomorrow morning you’re going to be two steps backwards. Different body chemistry, a different demand draw on your brain, recovery from a weird-ass dream when you’re pregnant and decapitating villains from a rope invisibility affixed to the sky is percolating in your mind.
Do this and wake up and feel fucking awful. You feel your old friendship with the Abyss, the comfort of the hurt, amniotic and thick and total. You swim in your human failure. In the DNA-level wrongness of you, human on Earth, born to brokenness and bodily calamity and the blessing of self-awareness has only lead you to such shame that you feel it must be rising off of you as steam pours off a hot sidewalk.
This is Okay.
You are building a muscle. It’s going to be weak for a good long while and it will shake when you use it unexpectedly for a more than a few moments. It will shake when it shouldn’t and you’ll think it will fail, and sometimes it will, because that pulsing sense of yourself in a positive light will fail. It has atrophied as you’ve got all these terrible habits that tell it to be quiet, still, to not scare you with the failure that feels such a part of it, such a part of you.
But once you start to stretch it and work it, it wants to stretch and work. It activates and suddenly, self-esteem isn’t this joke you tell yourself about beauty queens and models, it’s this being that involves his or herself in how you experience the world.
And it won’t always fail.
The time spent worrying about the negative impression you might be making on others – the self-esteem leans in and reminds you, gently, sometimes with a soupcon of snark, that you’re never going to see that jerk in the grocery store again. Or, you might, and if they have an opinion on your mismatched socks and want to share that with you, you can survive the encounter. You hear that and you straighten your spine and you let your shoulders fall free and you just got fifteen minutes back that you didn’t have to spend skulking and simpering and calculating a stranger’s untold disdain for you.
It’s sort of like having an administrative assistant for your inner bullshit. And so often, I think, when you have someone other than yourself involved in a problem, you take better care of it. It keeps falling to front of mind. You force yourself to step up. You want to avoid disappointing them so you fight back if only for the show of fighting back. If you can separate these threads of personality inside, you can listen to some of these voices and take up some of their causes. Just pretend they’re not your own. Maybe that’s not the best impetus for internal change.
Maybe you should be able to enact deep, cosmic change because you deserve it. Maybe.
Ideally, yeah, you can synthesize the self-esteem Administrative Assistant and the motivation coach and the creative muse and the squishy stuffed animal of friendship and the Crone Who Knows and the WASP Who Won’t and all the parts and pieces of your psyche into a single, consolidated you. But first, I think, you need to know who is up there rattling in your attic and invite them for some imaginary tea. Or imaginary coffee, or even just an imaginary census-taking.
This is my advice tonight. For myself and anyone else who might desire it. Those voices in your head: not all of them are wrong, and on a hard night running, one of them is willing to take charge for a minute and help you power through. Life is so dismal these days. It isn’t bad to sometimes let it work for you.
Self is fluid, shifting, wanting, protective, but where you recognize suffering in yourself, you are probably recognizing avoidance of truth. So sometimes that’s only the safe place to take the truth down your gullet: in the mirror, at a slant, a copy of a copy of a copy of the realization you are turning from it.
Do the littlest bit now. Stretch the self-esteem with a little white lie. Comb your hair. Stare blearily in the reflection that does not warm to your gaze. You’ll edge closer into the fire. Say: darling, we’re all going to burn, might as well turn up with our heads held high.
See where it gets you.
