I Am

[sanmagic7]

you know, bach, my D has often talked about the idea that her generation was told they could do or be anything they wanted, and they grew up believing that, only to fall on their butts time and time again cuz the reality was something totally different.  and they blamed themselves for the most part, and are not very happy. 

you were not given the tools nor the support or encouragement to reach your full potential.  that's not your fault.  yeah, if you'd gotten any of that, your life might have been different as far as 'success' goes.  but you didn't, and that's not your fault, either.  however, your intelligence, determination, and willingness to look both inside and outside yourself is intact.  you are writing here trying to figure out how to move forward from all that happened to you.  that's no mean feat, certainly not easy.  still, you persist, and for that you deserve all kinds of credit.

i have a lot of the same feelings that you mentioned about how different my social life could have been if i'd had some awareness of the positive qualities i possessed, how different my relationships might have been, how i could've recognized all the harm being done to me and stopped it much, much sooner in my adulthood.  instead i'm left with an empty feeling of 'could have been's', especially that i could have been much happier throughout my life if i'd only been given what i'd needed as a kid/adolescent.

it totally sucks, bach, but i get it. it did happen, and we're left with the aftermath, trying to live the best life possible under such a heavy shadow of neglect and abuse. i wish it weren't so for either of us.  love and hugs

[Bach]

Oh, san, thank you so much for your reply and for your understanding.  What you've written here is exactly what I'm talking about.  It's such a huge burden, that we have no choice but to carry.  So unfair!

About a year ago, I got some positive self-talk tapes (well, not really tapes, digital files, but Gen X thankyouverymuch), and have listened to them nearly every single day.  Of course I knew better than to believe that "You can change your life in just 30 days!", but still, I would have hoped for more improvement than I feel I've gotten after a whole year.  I've thought about putting the script into first person and making a recording of it in my own voice, but I'm afraid that if I did it would not sound sincere and that would make me feel even worse about myself.  I think the very phrase "self-esteem" has negative connotations for me.  I think that in my household it was sort of a putdown, like saying someone was egotistical.  And then there's the word "esteem", with which I realise I have a certain history.  Here's a weird one:  When my stepfather and my mother were first married, he gave me a copy of his Pulitzer-prize-winning book about something-something-American-history that he had inscribed "to (my name) With love and esteem, from (his name)".  What a strange gift to give to a small child.  What a strange thing to inscribe it with.  I was maybe 6.  I didn't know what "esteem" meant, although I understood it to be positive.  I know that when my mother and stepfather got married, she told me that he was excited about us being a family because he had three sons and had always wanted a daughter.  I think from these I got the notion that I would be appreciated and treated kindly by my stepfather.  Which of course I was not.  So perhaps I associate the word "esteem" with a broken promise. 

[sanmagic7]

perhaps, indeed, bach.  those word associations are strong.  usually, 'esteem' is a positive, from all i know, but i can see how it could've gotten twisted for you.  that's too bad, really.  actually, till you just wrote this, i never connected 'self' and 'esteem' in quite that way - how much esteem we have for our self.  to me it was one of those phrases that was always connected and just meant something about how well i thought of myself, what kind of regard i had for my 'self'.  that kind of thing.

i hope you can either delete that neg. connotation from the phrase 'self-esteem' or replace it w/ something that works for you.  and, i've never thought of self-esteem as being connected to being egotistical, but, again, sounds like it got twisted for you.  i've thought of 'arrogance' as thinking too much of oneself, as in 'better than' in some way - that's got an egotistical ring to it in my mind.  aaaah, the power of words.

we've been dealt some rotten hands in our lives.  as kenny rogers said, we've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, know when to run.  and that's good advice, as far as it goes, but sometimes those hands are so attached to us, it's hard to get away, walking, running, flying, folding, whatever.  we're still at the table tho, for what it's worth, still making decisions about what to do with what we got.  i give us a lot of credit for that.  love and hugs