Caterwauling

How is your self-esteem? Do you have enough? Could you use more? Yeah, me too.

I was doing some thinking today at my favorite park — I was swinging on the swingset (one of my favorite stress-relievers in life), lying all the way back with my hair grazing the ground, watching the world from my upside-down position. And that kind of opened up a new perspective that I hadn’t considered on why so many of us are hitting roadblocks in our relationships, in our careers, in our ambitions. We don’t have enough belief in or respect for just what it is that we personally can accomplish.

From the time we are babies, we are confined somewhere — in a womb, in a playpen, in some kind of seatbelted apparatus. But despite that, when we are free, we learn to crawl, to walk, to run toward all of those objects that everyone tells us “no” and “stop that!” when we try to grasp them. And eventually, we learn that we get yelled at when we do certain things, so we don’t do them for that reason alone. But does it mean that the things are wrong to do in general or was our only fault in the situation simply going against an adult’s wishes?

That said, we are conditioned from Day One to mind our place. And essentially, that means we’re all just big babies. But with nicer underwear.

Most kids, if we weren’t bullied in school, then we bore witness to it. We saw what happened to the kids who were different in some way. Think about it. Were you overweight, did you wear glasses, or did you have another physical or even personal characteristic that kept you from fully blending into the masses? Were you outspoken and defiant, did you dress differently (whether on purpose or because you couldn’t afford what was trendy), were your intellect and interests on different levels than your peers?

What I remember from that time in my life was going from being an outcast to befriending some. And something weird happened — I wasn’t so weird anymore. More popular people would befriend me and tell me to ditch the “losers.” In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t, but the memory of that time is so powerful — that feeling of being included by those who previously made your life miserable. I wish I’d stood up and told the two-faced jerks to suck it, and I probably would have formed lasting friendships with the people that I stupidly left behind. I’m not in touch with anybody from those days — not surprising, eh?

But then, you escape the confines of high school and go to college or wherever you spend your next years, becoming enlightened and liberated and learning that the world is so much bigger than you’ve seen. You absorb all you can about your subjects, your comrades, even the weird Resident Adviser on your floor because she’s too eclectic to be ignored and, ultimately, too fascinating to resist midnight smoke and tea breaks with during exam week.

She is the girl you remember. She marched to the beat of her own drum. She is the girl you wanted to be. She is the girl I became. The one you really don’t think about when you meet me and yet the one you can’t forget because of something I said or the way I said it or, possibly, because of the absolute and utter passion I injected into whatever belief I held. I don’t ask you to believe the same as me, but I will tell you in no uncertain terms why you should just listen to me. Because I remember what it was like during that brief period when I didn’t stand up for what I believed.

But then you find a new venue … the real world. And it’s high school all over again without the ’80s hair.

And it’s back to the square root of self-esteem. The reason nobody has enough of it is because certain people can only feel successful if everyone around them is failing or, at least, feeling too uncertain to ask questions. And the easiest way to make that happen is to convince them of it until it eventually happens. Even the strongest among us can eventually succumb to mindfuck. I’m not saying that the bullies aren’t talented, but when the talent they decide to use is masterminding everyone else’s misery to escalate their own success, well, what a wasted resource. Really.

I was telling a friend the other day how so many hacks will always have a warm bed in which to sleep while the idealists who are truly potential change agents will die alone on the streets with only their dreams to keep them warm. He who refuses to play the game in the pre-established way is barred from playing again (e.g., “you’ll never work in this town again”).

This needs to stop. No matter what age we are at, we need to band together and save ourselves as a community. Why is the creative (or just plain different) class rejected to second-class citizenry when we are the ones who can become single-handedly responsible for the success of every individual who wishes to feel the rewards of honest, sincere contributions to our society? Be better than what they want us to be, friends, because even the best insurance plan can’t mend a broken spirit — yours or those of the people who were counting on you to be strong enough to help them, too.

On iTunes: Bon Jovi, “Bang a Drum”

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 18th, 2004 at 7:42 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.