Identity Death

A variety of ideas about myself have served as the basis of my self-worth in the course of my life. My success academically, variety of hobbies, awesomeness at computer games, intelligence, skill at listening, helpfulness of what I have to say, and the approval of others have been more or less important to my self esteem. All of the skills or qualities I have mentioned are ultimately fleeting.

Anxiously hiding from the world in my attic room was a crisis for me in a variety of ways, but one of the ways was in how it challenged my notions of self esteem. Before then, a part of me that I based my self esteem on might fade or prove illusory, but there were always other notions for my self esteem to feed on and new ones would spring up. Withdrawing from the world saw the complete and simultaneous collapse of all of the ideas I had associated with my self esteem.

Nothing worthwhile about myself remained, at least as far as I could see. Still, I felt awful remaining the way I was, so I slowly started opening up to others despite my fears. Through opening up to others I discovered that there still was and always will be a valuable aspect of my existence; I am the embodiment of a story. There are other aspects of our humanity that have value regardless of who we are, but my biography was the first aspect I discovered.

My biography up to that point was a story of dishonesty, fear, and self-destruction, but it was still a story that others might benefit from hearing. Each of us has a unique biography, and there is value in each of those stories regardless of what happens in them. In particular I felt I had something of value to say regarding compulsive lying, as it is presently poorly understood.

Eventually my self esteem found other concepts just as fleeting as before to attach itself to, despite my efforts to restrain it. I still feel a powerful pull on my self esteem from the views, likes, and comments my blog gets, for example. However, it is comforting to know that I have a bedrock to my psychology that I will always be able to fall back on should everything else fail me. Even if I became unable to tell my story, I would still live it, and carry it forward simply through being human.