Confident Girl

I came across this lit­tle girl who was kid­ding around with a tuk tuk driver(note the lit­tle red tuk tuk in the cor­ner) who was parked. She stuck her tongue out and he called her
“muy fea” – very ugly. She gave him the look I pho­tographed here, fear­less, funny.

At some point in my life I came to believe that I had low or no self esteem. Maybe it was the pat­tern of deci­sions that neglected to include what was bet­ter for me. An exam­ple, you ask? Dat­ing toxic women with­out even know­ing they were toxic; refus­ing to stand up to abu­sive peo­ple in my work life and the extra fun corol­lary (that always fol­lows refus­ing to stand up to bul­lies) of becom­ing a bully in my work life.

This last one is what is on my mind, the bul­ly­ing thing. On my recent trip to Guatemala as part of sur­gi­cal mis­sion team, I had the oppor­tu­nity to work with peo­ple who have known me, but not worked with me in some time. In that time I have done some work. Mul­ti­ple peo­ple said to me things like, ‘wow, you are nice now,’ ‘you are not the guy I thought you were’ etc. These com­pli­ments stung a lit­tle, because I know I had been a hard guy to be with in the oper­at­ing room, the halls of the hos­pi­tal, the ER. I still can be, but it is less, truly. It is less because I like myself bet­ter, accept that I deserve to be here sim­ply because I am here – more on that in a sec.

At some point a child gets beat down enough or their neu­ro­trans­mit­ters fail or they swal­low some lie about their fun­da­men­tal bad­ness and they get the idea that they are worth­less. I did that. I made it a belief. In terms of behav­ior, beliefs drive the bus. Beliefs gen­er­ate my feel­ings (you didn’t know you made up all your feel­ings?) and my thoughts and my actions fol­low. We can argue this if you want, just write to me or post a com­ment. For now pre­tend I am right. The lit­tle me gained a belief that he was worth­less, lead­ing to feel­ings of pain/shame/anger lead­ing to actions to avoid these feel­ings (med­ica­tion) and/or to pass them on (bul­ly­ing). It was not until fairly recently that I decided to chal­lenge the belief. I chal­lenged the belief because it was caus­ing a lot of dam­age. Also, I wanted to start liv­ing within my val­ues and the con­stant atten­tion on myself that deny­ing my self worth requires, forced me to live out­side of my val­ues. I am a per­son who does not want to cen­ter every wak­ing minute on me. I value self­less­ness, in other words. The effort to hold on to the shame and the false belief that I am worth­less was becom­ing an ego trip of mon­u­men­tal pro­por­tions and also was way past being bor­ing for me and every­one else. How then to accept my self worth?

I accepted yours. I asked myself if I believed that you deserve to have my basic respect sim­ply because you exist, because you are a part of human­ity. Answer: yes. If that is true then how to I go about exclud­ing myself (for lack of wor­thi­nesss) from the group called human­ity? How do I say I don’t deserve to belong to that group espe­cially when say­ing that forces to me to spend every wak­ing sec­ond prov­ing how unique my shame is – so unique I don’t even deserve the basic human respect every per­son believes for only draw­ing breath? That is a lot of energy, a lot of ego. It started to look ridiculous.

I am here and because of that I have my atten­tion and respect. I don’t have to prop my esteem up on the wreck­age I cre­ate in an effort to level every­one to my noth­ing. I am respon­si­ble for my own pro­tec­tion and love, first. It is not on you. Some­how learn­ing this has allowed me to be a bet­ter, not per­fect, guy at work. I can deal with my ongo­ing feel­ings more eas­ily because the fun­da­men­tal belief is changed. In fact if I start to feel the shame I have to talk myself in to it because the shame is incon­gru­ent with my belief about my worth. I still do feel it, but it is now more like a mem­ory than reality.

I liked this lit­tle girl because she didn’t flinch. She didn’t believe him. She laughed and went on with her snack. I real­ize I am totally mak­ing up the story of this lit­tle girl, but oh well. She helped me feel the love that the peo­ple who work with me were show­ing. I had enough of me in the game to let it sink in and know I deserved it.