Contingent Self-Worth

I am often been plagued by anxious episodes brought on by how I feel others think of me. A part of it is friendship anxiety, another part of it is some sort of depressive disorder, and another still is just my wild paranoia. I get caught up in moments when I feel like the world is ending because of something someone said or did to me, and as much as I tried to brace myself for these moments the moments can still happen. For example if ever I felt myself attracted to a girl, a situation I try to avoid because I know myself well enough by now, then I find myself getting far too wrapped up in what that girl thinks of me. Now this is not unusual but it can get to the point where the tiniest gestures of the person can make or break my day. Anything from seeing the person smile at me to not returning a dumb Facebook message can have a huge effect on how I carry myself. Over time this just becomes me acting like a moronic nervous wreck because I do not pay enough attention to my own needs. I care more about the effect I have on another person but there is more to my brief life than just trying to make other people happy. Around this time last year my Mother came to visit me. A few weeks before that I was in the hospital because a friend was worried I would kill myself. A year later I look back on the event and laugh it off, but I used to be terrified to talk about it. What would people think of me? Would I be seen fool who was too afraid to live? Would my closest friends and colleagues suddenly reject me because my mental wiring was not perfect? During this period my grades fell and my door remained shut. Everyone was either an enemy or showed my more compassion then I felt like I deserved, after all who would willingly show kindness to a nut?

That entire train of thought turned out to be just ridiculous.

There is nothing wrong with feeling scared or alone, in fact I still spent a lot of time by myself. The difference is now I understand that I have more worth than I initially suspected. I have written about my woes countless times and never gets easier to admit that I am cared for. Isn't that such a striking concept? In our society due to our individualistic nature it almost feels like we have to go everything alone, like life is not a collaborative effort but rather a collection of humans all running their own races. Most of our interactions come from texts and computer screens which only make distance seem that much farther and potential warmth that much colder. In a situation I went through recently I was interested in a person that had no interest in being anything other than a friend to me, and a great one at that. However in my foolish desire to spread affection and twist fate I kept pursuing, ultimately getting to a point where I could have ruined a friendship in a gamble. When things got tense in the situation I would respond with drama, drowning in my own self pity and dark funk until I was forced to snap out of it for class or practice. It became such an event that I would proclaim how much I hated myself or how terrible I was, just because I felt like someone on this planet whom I fancied may or may not have disliked me. Luckily for me I have amazing friends who are willing to call me out on how dumb I am acting and how irrational I am being. One in particular got the worst of it, for a straight week all I would do is complain to them and they never gave up on me, we were on a Skype call for almost 2 hours and a big chunk of it was me complaining and them listening patiently.All because they put value in me that I did not put in myself. They refused to ever give into my attempts at pitying myself and figuratively slapped me out of my blues. For the longest time my self-worth has been contingent on how much love I have felt. I am at my brightest when I can talk to people everyday, make others laugh, and generally not feel alone. On the opposite of that if I do not feel love (for whatever irrelevant reason) then I shut down and assume the world and everyone in it despises me...and I am trying my hardest to shift that. To the person whose company I fancied and I was too overbearing toward I can only offer my apologizes and hope you can forgive all of my madness. People make mistakes and I try to learn from mine, even though this one was a long time coming.

These past few days I have found it near impossible to stay down for too long, every time I try to be negative something pops up that I am looking forward to. Maybe it has always been this way and I was too stubborn to notice it. From an upcoming NJR show to the No Disclaimers Poetry Slam to dances I am making and music I and getting involved with life is going places. I still get caught up in my own sorrows, I still feel like a big chunk of my positivity depends on those around me because my friends play such a big role in my life, and I still doubt myself...but so what? I had a friend go through a break up recently and my response to them actually prompted me to want to write this. I told them that they are amazing, that they should never base their worth over what anyone says to them or how a person makes them feel. It is so hard not get caught up in perception and paranoia but other people's opinions of you can only really do so much. I consider myself a bit of a misfit, stuck in between the lines of pre-made notions and social roles, as a lot of my generation tends to be. For what it's worth I know that there are a lot of people out there who feel lost like I do. The world is too vast to let the opinions of others devalue you in anyway. My Religion professor quoted a great line in class today, he said “The Tiger has no regrets”, referring to an animals nature to just be itself. We are humans, cursed with sentience and feeling like we may be more or less important to the universe than we actually are. I do not want to think of myself as important in the grand scheme of life because that is a huge burden, I want to focus on the now and how amazing I find to people around me to be. I befriend a suite last semester that reminded me of what it feels like to have a solid group of friends in one place away from my hometown. I am getting the chance to listen to more music and read more about the world than ever before. I am challenging myself in classes that sometimes seem daunting but I know have the capacity to make it. And even though the feelings never panned out I still got the chance to spend time with an awesome person. We are not what others think of us, we are what we make of ourselves. This post is as much as it is for myself as it is for any reader down on their luck. I love myself, and I am no longer afraid to admit it. I still get anxious, break down, get angry, doubt myself, and feel like a bad person, but at the end of the day I would never want to be anything else, and I am proud of how hard I have come.