I last posted over a year ago, during which time I was experiencing some low self-esteem because of my social perception. Well, here I am again, somewhat unburdened by those issues, but nevertheless plagued by my aimless life wandering.
On paper, my life seems rather impressive, but I've never been able to match the credentials to the way I feel about myself, life, etc. My ostensibly stable life is riddled with family dysfunction, political work drama, and the never-ending battle with depression. Maybe I just need to shove my face in a UV box and I'll start feeling better.
I try to think back to the days when I was the happiest - this was approximately a one-year period when I was around 13. Having been fed spoonfuls of physical expectations from my mother, I had always struggled with my self-image and I had finally reached a point where I was as physically attractive as I was going to be and I was happy. I was successful in my amateur figure skating career, successful in school, and as successful in my social life as I was going to be, having one best friend I really cared about and that was all I needed. I was riding high on self-esteem and self-efficacy. I felt that I could do whatever I wanted and that the world was my proverbial oyster. Then, freshman year of high school began, and with its classical pubescent upheavals, underlying trauma, physical and mental illness, and social demise, brought on a crash of self-esteem and direction from which I have yet to recover.
I guess it's easiest to try to emulate parts of your life that made you happy in order to make you happy again. Just plug in certain variables and you'll end up with the answer to the equation you were looking for. I guess for me, those things I mentioned before are the variables: physical fitness, professional and personal success. The only concrete variable of these three is physical fitness, soothingly that I lost about 10 years ago and have not recovered. At least getting to that point is a matter of motivation and effort, but the other two, professional and personal success, are much more abstract.
What does it really mean to be professionally successful? Take my job as a nurse, for instance. I work in the most lucrative (for the institution) unit in the number one children's hospital in the country. So I suppose, I've got prestige. That's something. Under a microscope, my day-to-day job is much less glamorous - I work with a homogenous group of people whose unofficial mantra is conformity to whatever social norm dominates a given context. There's a subliminal hazing ritual that you have to pass through to be accepted - adopt certain colloquialisms, styles of dress, forms of humor, and a sense of insecure superiority and derision that will be perpetuated across all generations of staff. In other words, achieving social success is the means to achieving the opportunity to be a skillful, valued employee. Needless to say, conformity isn't my strong suit. Diversity, it appears, turns out to be something I am much more passionate about than I had ever really acknowledged. A multitudinous group contributes much more to a situation than a linearly developed group. Bottom line: being an intelligent, half-Hispanic woman with all the potential in the world gets me nowhere in this job unless I attain some social capital. I want to be challenged and work hard to achieve results and despite my best efforts, I am not given the opportunity to do so in my job. It seems as though I may need to change things up and try something new in order to fulfill my professional goals: to thrive in a prestigious job where I make enough money to be comfortable and am recognized for my contributions.
Personal success. I guess my thirteen-year-old success was being a fairly decent figure skater. Skating gave me an opportunity to work hard to improve my skills and put those skills to the test in competitions. Practice, performance, evaluation, success. Now, I don't have anything in my life like skating to reinforce my personal success, and introspection may bring the answers I seek.
External validation seems to be a ruling factor in my life. I have long been trying to incorporate a self-validating practice into my own self-evaluation, but my self-esteem has been so low that I cannot even trust my own opinion, anymore. I continuously wage a war against depression and it's hard to view life as something I should put my energy into. I think I need to spend more time in my life doing things, seeing things come to fruition, and perhaps I will start to feel like I have enough worth to be judging myself.
On paper, my life seems rather impressive, but I've never been able to match the credentials to the way I feel about myself, life, etc. My ostensibly stable life is riddled with family dysfunction, political work drama, and the never-ending battle with depression. Maybe I just need to shove my face in a UV box and I'll start feeling better.
I try to think back to the days when I was the happiest - this was approximately a one-year period when I was around 13. Having been fed spoonfuls of physical expectations from my mother, I had always struggled with my self-image and I had finally reached a point where I was as physically attractive as I was going to be and I was happy. I was successful in my amateur figure skating career, successful in school, and as successful in my social life as I was going to be, having one best friend I really cared about and that was all I needed. I was riding high on self-esteem and self-efficacy. I felt that I could do whatever I wanted and that the world was my proverbial oyster. Then, freshman year of high school began, and with its classical pubescent upheavals, underlying trauma, physical and mental illness, and social demise, brought on a crash of self-esteem and direction from which I have yet to recover.
I guess it's easiest to try to emulate parts of your life that made you happy in order to make you happy again. Just plug in certain variables and you'll end up with the answer to the equation you were looking for. I guess for me, those things I mentioned before are the variables: physical fitness, professional and personal success. The only concrete variable of these three is physical fitness, soothingly that I lost about 10 years ago and have not recovered. At least getting to that point is a matter of motivation and effort, but the other two, professional and personal success, are much more abstract.
What does it really mean to be professionally successful? Take my job as a nurse, for instance. I work in the most lucrative (for the institution) unit in the number one children's hospital in the country. So I suppose, I've got prestige. That's something. Under a microscope, my day-to-day job is much less glamorous - I work with a homogenous group of people whose unofficial mantra is conformity to whatever social norm dominates a given context. There's a subliminal hazing ritual that you have to pass through to be accepted - adopt certain colloquialisms, styles of dress, forms of humor, and a sense of insecure superiority and derision that will be perpetuated across all generations of staff. In other words, achieving social success is the means to achieving the opportunity to be a skillful, valued employee. Needless to say, conformity isn't my strong suit. Diversity, it appears, turns out to be something I am much more passionate about than I had ever really acknowledged. A multitudinous group contributes much more to a situation than a linearly developed group. Bottom line: being an intelligent, half-Hispanic woman with all the potential in the world gets me nowhere in this job unless I attain some social capital. I want to be challenged and work hard to achieve results and despite my best efforts, I am not given the opportunity to do so in my job. It seems as though I may need to change things up and try something new in order to fulfill my professional goals: to thrive in a prestigious job where I make enough money to be comfortable and am recognized for my contributions.
Personal success. I guess my thirteen-year-old success was being a fairly decent figure skater. Skating gave me an opportunity to work hard to improve my skills and put those skills to the test in competitions. Practice, performance, evaluation, success. Now, I don't have anything in my life like skating to reinforce my personal success, and introspection may bring the answers I seek.
External validation seems to be a ruling factor in my life. I have long been trying to incorporate a self-validating practice into my own self-evaluation, but my self-esteem has been so low that I cannot even trust my own opinion, anymore. I continuously wage a war against depression and it's hard to view life as something I should put my energy into. I think I need to spend more time in my life doing things, seeing things come to fruition, and perhaps I will start to feel like I have enough worth to be judging myself.
