I'm Just A Sucker With No Self Esteem

Here’s a poem I recently wrote. Being a poem it is necessarily extreme. It is called Self Downing.

I'm bad

I know I'm bad

I'm a sinner

Not a winner

Selfish grinner

Full smile wiped off my dirty face

The lowest of the limbo low

No further southern point to go

Wicked as the devil could be

Despicably depraved me

A wriggly worm in the dirt

A slimy slug in your herbaceous borders

I'm completely out of order

All my thoughts are disgusting

All my words curses

All my deeds dastardly

Totally unlovable

Irredeemable

Every inch a failure

Never hitting the mark

A capital L loser

A pig in a poke

A dog eating its own puke

Pack myself in a suitcase and hide

Nobody deserves to see this

Take me away and throw me into the sea!

Oh mercy me! Oh mercy mercy me!

This addresses an issue which makes and keeps us depressed. We ignore any good in what we do. We ignore any achievements. We use only negative language to describe ourselves. We focus on a bad thing we’ve done and let that colour everything else. We assume we should be more skilful, do more, succeed in everything, be popular. And when we miss that mark we’ve set for ourselves we throw our hands up in the air and declare ourselves useless, hopeless and we stop trying. Rather than looking to see if this was just a blip or a glitch or a bad day, we declare this is everything and this is just how we are and always will be. And that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How do we get out of this? We calmly and rationally ask ourselves some questions. Starting with why we believe we must be more skilful, more productive, successful, popular. Is there any proof that this is the case? Are these demands real? We then have to assume the answer is no and encourage ourselves with answers like, I would like to be a more skilful person, but there is no proof that I have to be. I would like to be more productive, but there is no proof that I have to be. And so on. This disarms the demands we accepted and turns them into preferences. It releases the pressure valve. We can relax. 

This doesn’t mean we just accept a perceived mediocrity. It should just mean we take off the pressure to perform and change our approach to improvement. We need to change our mindset so we attempt improvement but do not beat ourselves up if we fail sometimes. We keep calm and carry on. We don’t throw in the towel at the first setback.

I want to say something about self-esteem before closing, as that is linked, I think. Constantly putting ourselves down suggests we don’t value our worth. We think we’re either perfect or we’re useless, and there is no middle ground. This black and white thinking is part of the landscape of depression. And coming from a Christian viewpoint I think our understanding of the Bible may contribute to this. Not that the Bible is at fault but rather the depressed mind reading the Bible is at fault. The depressed mind focusses on original sin, “I am a worm and not a man”, “even our good deeds are like menstrual cloths”, I have sinned in every thought and word and deed. It does not focus on original goodness, being made in the image of God, “I have loved you with an everlasting love”, “as the Father has loved me, so have I loved you”. Both sides of this equation are Christian and need to be attended to in their proper contexts. The self-esteem of the Christian does not derive from within, it derives from the knowledge of being created in the likeness of God, being loved by God, being redeemed by God, etc. All these are things which are outside ourselves and in which we played no part. If we gather our self-esteem from what we have done it will be a poor showing. God thinks we are worth it, and so He loved us and sent His only Son for us. This is an act of God which should instil in us a sense of how He values His children.

Overthinking

Overthinking

Analysing to the nth degree

Leading down the path to stagnation

If I ever get on the path

Constantly rethinking

écoute et répète

Incessantly

Excessively

But nothing changes in the thought

Between the third time and the tenth

Stagnation, catastrophization

Huge little obstacle, poses an insoluble problem

This is not a flight I fancy

I must wait a while

Return

And overthink some more

This poem I wrote last year sums up my experience. Thankfully, I seem to have mostly conquered this miserable habit. Thinking the same thoughts over and over, trying to figure something out from all angles, coming to no satisfactory conclusion, continuing to think, to gain some sense of mental control. Only to find out that what I overthought about never came to pass anyway. What a waste of time and effort!

While the desire to analyse and dissect is not in itself wrong, it can become obsessive and stifling. You become a prisoner in your own mind. Say it’s a decision you need to make. Of course you need to think about it, weighing up pros and cons. But at some point you need to decide on a course of action. Overthinking it just makes you uncertain what to do. You procrastinate. You think about it some more. You come to no conclusion. You do nothing. Then, when you can put it off no longer, you fearfully make a decision, worried everything will be difficult and go wrong. In fear and trembling you set the ball rolling – and everything is straightforward, runs smoothly, and you wonder why you made a fuss. And yet next time you go through that whole process again. It’s not a nice way to live, foreseeing imaginary problems, exaggerating threats.

Or another scenario. You know you’re going to have to talk to someone and you know what you want to say. So you try to anticipate how they may respond. Then for every possible response you consider counter responses. And so on. You end up with several potential ways the conversation could go. You get fearful. This conversation takes on a terrifying element. You’re expecting a big battle, a huge falling out. Or maybe you’re expecting to embarrass yourself. With sweaty palms, thudding heart, red face you enter the conversation and find out everything is perfectly cordial. You wound yourself up for nothing.

It’s clear to me that what needs to change is our attitude. When we notice we’ve started to overthink, we need to pause. We need to ask ourselves whether this is really necessary, whether the problem is real or imaginary, what will be gained by overthinking. By all means think things through, but agree with yourself you won’t keep covering the same ground over and over - that you’ll make a decision and stick with it. If you notice yourself going over the same thoughts again and again, calmly keep telling yourself, “I’ve been over that and now I understand, I know what I’m doing, I don’t need to think it through again”. If this is hard, go and do something to distract yourself. Maybe try to write your thought processes and decisions on paper. Then when you start to overthink you can say to yourself, “I’ve been through this already and have written it down – I don’t need to think about it again”. Realise that things are not likely to be as bad as you assume. There may well be difficulties but they’re unlikely to be devastating or impossible to overcome. Assess risk sensibly, don’t inflate it unnecessarily. Ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen, then tell yourself that’s extremely unlikely. Remind yourself of past situations when you worried for nothing.

It can take a long while to beat overthinking, but it is worth it. The temptation will often lurk there, but you can beat it.

God Wants You Miserable

This is one extreme of Christian belief. The idea that God wants you to avoid anything that you might enjoy. The cosmic killjoy, averse to fun and pleasure. The God of “Thou shalt not”. Big Brother in the sky, keeping a beady eye on you, ready to pounce if He sees a smile. To be fair, it’s possible to see why some would come up with that idea. There are a lot of rules and regulations in the Old Testament and the punishments can seem draconian. But they’re there for a reason. They’re not arbitrary. They’re boundaries placed for the good of the people of Israel. They’re not meant to squash, but to show how to please God.

Christians are not under that covenant. Yet some of us look to that Old Testament law and, instead of interpreting it as fulfilled by Christ, we try to apply it to ourselves as if we were still subject to it. By doing so, we’re in danger of acting as if Christ never died. We don’t mean to. I firmly believe the intention is honourable – we want to please God; we don’t want to offend Him like the Israelites did. 

This is a huge subject which has occupied greater minds than mine so I’m only going to make one observation. (If you want to get a grip on some of the issues, read Galatians and Hebrews.) Galatians 3:23-25: “Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed.  So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.  Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.” The old Law was not meant to be forever. It was there to show us how sinful we are and that we need a Saviour. It was to teach us what God is like and what we are like – until Christ came. The Law taught us about God in words. Christ taught us about God in words and in flesh. He showed us what God is like. If we’re in Christ, we’re not under the guardianship of the Law. We’ve grown up. We’ve put away childish things. So we don’t need to work out what it means in our day. We don’t need to tie ourselves up in knots over little things. 

Does this mean we can do what we want, then? That God’s no longer bothered about holiness? That we can sin and be happy? No, it doesn’t! There’s plenty in the New Testament about that. Staying in Galatians, following a list of things which characterise those who will not inherit the kingdom of God, we have this: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23) This is one aspect of life under the New Covenant. These are things God wants us to be. They’re not things designed to make us miserable. They’re things which will keep us in step with God. They will make us free.