When Loving Yourself Is Too Hard

“It seems like your self-esteem has taken a beating,” my therapist said.

I was going through a hard time — the loss of meaning in my poker career, feeling directionless, feeling like a failure and the break up of my relationship.

My inner critic came roaring out of the depths of my consciousness and threw an EDC festival in my brain.

“You have no skills.”

“You’re not that smart.”

“You will never be good enough.”

“You’re not worthy to be with her.”

On and on and on, my inner critic sang.

To get it to shut up, I signed up for therapy.

It was my first meeting with my therapist did I realise I had such low self-esteem and desperately needed to love myself.

Self-esteem is a person’s subjective view of themselves. In other words, what they think they’re worth.

Yet self-esteem can’t be empirically tested or measured. At best, you fill in a questionnaire, and the rating you get is based on your own judgement. Which is obviously biased.

At my lowest point, I fell for the idea that it could be fixed with some therapy. I thought that by turning up weekly at the end of it all, I was somehow going to love myself and find happiness packaged neatly in a little box with a bow on top.

But boy, was I in for a surprise. After nine months of therapy, I was still far from loving myself.

One year on, here’s what I’ve learned to make life a bit more bearable: it becomes easier when you accept who you are.

I’m still trying to love myself, but I’m at a point where I’m okay living with myself. And that’s okay. I don’t have to rush the process. The relationship I have with myself is the most important one, and I’ve got the rest of my life to fall in love.

Here are some things I did to help myself become okay with who I am.

Acknowledge Where You Are

Losing everything and moving back to my parent’s house at age 29, my first instinct was to deny my shame.

It was a bitter pill to swallow that I had no idea what I was going to do. I had no money coming in, and my bank account was rapidly dwindling. I had a huge hole in my heart, and I had lost my independence.

But to move on, I had to accept where I was. I looked in the mirror and said, “Jason, this is who you are, and this is where you are right now, back to where it all started.”

I needed to stop denying that I didn’t let my life go to shit. I needed to admit that I messed up.

The first step to change is to accept who you are now, but then you get to decide who you are in the future.

Drop The Nouns

I had spent eleven years fiercely attached to the labels and core beliefs I had about myself. I was scared to let go and start all over again. I thought I was too old to start anything new, I thought I wasn’t qualified enough to start a business and needed to go to business school. I thought I was terrible at writing.

But when we’re young, labels and beliefs are handed to us by those who we think know better. They have little bearing on who we are now. The problem with assigning a label to ourselves is that they become way more powerful than they should be. We hold on to them too tightly, even if it means we sabotage ourselves in the process.

The next step to changing is to drop the nouns and think of yourself as a verb.

Oscar Wilde says it best:

“If you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it — that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — an actor, a writer — I am a person who does things — I write, I act — and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

All the labels that you’ve assigned to yourself, ignore them and act towards who you want to be.

Find Your Cheerleaders

95% of my friends were poker players. It’s a cut-throat competitive environment, and sometimes envy can seep through. I took an honest look at my friends and decided to cut them out.

But it wasn’t so easy. After all, I had spent many years building a connection and creating memories with them.

To make things easier, I found the people who made me feel good about myself and spent more time with them. Over time, I began to phase out those old poker friends.

Find your cheerleaders, and prioritise spending time with these people.

Start Counting The Little Wins

I thought winning big was the only thing that mattered. So when I stopped winning big, it was hard to see I was capable of doing anything.

Starting over again, I committed to finding little wins in my life: Making the bed every morning, dressing well, making a good cup of coffee, learning something new, writing one true sentence, or crossing one thing off from my to-do list. Every time I won, I acknowledged I was capable of turning up for myself.

It wasn’t just the things I did for myself, but for others too: Turning up on time, listening to them, asking them questions, buying them coffee or dinner.

When your self-esteem is low, it’s hard to give yourself any credit. But the path to rebuilding your esteem is to acknowledge and praise yourself. Give yourself a pat on the shoulder because you’re doing okay.

Create A Win File

When life feels hard, it can be easy to forget how far you’ve come. It’s easy to think how you’re not enough, how you haven’t achieved enough, or how you haven’t progressed as fast as you wanted.

You mistake the forest for the trees.

This thinking will keep you stuck. Remember, what got you here won’t get you there.

Instead, collect all your wins and save them on your phone or your computer. Any compliments you receive, the knowledge you’ve gathered, all the photos you’ve made with friends and save them.

When you feel like you’re drowning, open up the file and remind yourself how far you’ve come.

It’s a lie that you will be happier when you reach the person you want to become. Happiness is in the now. Don’t wait till then to allow yourself to be happy because life is not about the destination, it’s about the journey.

You don’t have to love yourself for your self-esteem to improve. You just need to see yourself taking the action towards who you want to become. Be a verb, and just keep doing.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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