I was thinking earlier that my self-image is pretty well shot these days, so while I was gardening I set to thinking about the ramifications of such a condition.
Well, I suppose the most obvious effect is that it makes you feel unwanted, since it would be hard to imagine why anybody else would want something you don’t think much of yourself. OK, that’s the first step. So what effect does feeling unwanted have? I would say there are two likely outcomes.
One is that it might make you belligerent and generally unpleasant to people, because that places their rejection of you seemingly in your own hands. It promotes the welcome delusion that you are choosing your own alienation, and even vindicates any disposition to being alienated that you might have had before the development of poor self-image.
The second is to make you feel disempowered. If you feel unwanted because you think yourself inadequate, it follows that you can’t approach people because rejection would be more or less inevitable. That means you have to wait for them to approach you, which they’re unlikely to do because most people – especially women – are quite good at reading negative energy, and are inclined to shun those who project it.
Either way, these two outcomes naturally feed the poor self-image and produce what amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. In short, things just get worse and worse.
And the fundamental question remains: what causes poor self-image in the first place? Being aware of one’s inadequacies coupled with an idealistic nature, I suppose. That’s what makes it so difficult to deal with, since we all have inadequacies, and idealism is a state of mind that’s almost impossible to throw off. And would you want to?
So am I really talking about myself here? Only partly. It seems to me that being a man with poor self-image isn’t as bad as being a woman, especially a young woman. Young women know full well that they only have to dress a certain way and go to a certain sort of place and they’ll get plenty of attention from the opposite sex. The problem is that it’s the wrong sort of attention and only makes matters worse in the long run.
That’s thought for the day, and maybe it’s all a load of tosh.
2 comments:
Interesting question.
I think some of the bad self-image stuff comes from personality, it's just a part of who you are. But culture helps, and probably what other people thought of you when you still cared about what people thought. Or what people told you you thought of yourself.
Luckily, if you know the things that can aggravate this, you can decide what to do about it.
Unfortunately, the only thing that's really worked for me is a new start, like the beginning of a new school year.
Good luck! Anything us readers can do?
You have bad self-image? I wouldn't have guessed; you come across as too open and well balanced.
Yes, you can stand me a piece of cheesecake when I finally get around to doing that world tour.
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