Hickey: Embrace positive self-esteem: Why dislike yourself?

Something really frightening happened yesterday when I looked in the mirror.

In fact, it’s…Something really frightening happened yesterday when I looked in the mirror.

In fact, it’s been happening for weeks. More often than not, for almost a month now, I’ve looked in the mirror and felt … basically alright about what I saw.

Getting comfortable with my own appearance is something I’ve been working toward, with no small amount of struggle, for years. And now that I seem to be arriving at my goal, the emotion I feel is less triumph than fear. Where do I get off feeling good about how I look? Who gave me permission to go around thinking I’m some sort of hot property? What kind of conceited jerk am I turning into?

As an adult, hating yourself is a choice. That doesn’t mean I think you can snap out of it just like that; drinking is still a choice if you’re an alcoholic, but I don’t believe it’s fair to expect an addict to just wake up one morning and stop drinking without any qualified help and support. Staying in an abusive relationship is a choice, but with things like children’s safety or the ability to pay the rent on the line, it’s hardly as simple as “Why don’t you just leave?”

Self-loathing is a choice that I, in particular, continued to make for most of my life, and stopped making only very recently. And now that I’ve broken the cycle, I can see a lot of the reasons I made that choice.

Despite the best efforts of Oprah’s O magazine to tell people otherwise, being proud of yourself is not cool. Many girls, like me, probably have memories of realizing around sixth or seventh grade that constantly putting yourself down is one of the most crucial norms of girl culture, and that anyone who deviates from it will stick out like a sore thumb. This is middle school we’re talking about; if you stick out, especially in a way that leads people to think of you as conceited, you are going to be quickly and brutally cut down.

When middle school ends and self-deprecating behavior ceases to be rewarded socially, it persists as a superstitious behavior. Even the Bible teaches that those who humble themselves will be exalted, and those who exalt themselves will be humbled. Jesus wasn’t preaching the virtue of the inferiority complex, yet his words echo the self-denigrating superstition I know too well. It goes like this: If I believe that I am not worthy, perhaps the world will find a way to prove to me that I am; but if I believe I am worthy, the universe will surely and swiftly prove to me how mistaken I was.

We all know how believing that you aren’t competent or lovable can be a self-fulfilling prophecy that harms your career and relationships, but this pill seems somehow easier to swallow: If you’re going to fail, at least it won’t catch you by surprise.

This superstition is intensely difficult to shake. I still feel sometimes that if I go around honestly, unapologetically thinking I’m intelligent and capable, all the grad schools will reject me just to prove me wrong; if I start to find myself physically attractive, my boyfriend will run off with someone better-looking.

And finally, when we’ve accepted the fiction of our worthlessness for long enough, we start to make ridiculous leaps of logic to hang onto it, not because we want to hang onto our inferiority complexes — no one really does — but because when you come to believe something to be intrinsic and immutable truth, you start to screen out or pervert data that doesn’t agree with it. If you believe it as intrinsically and immutably true that homosexuality is wrong and gay people are deeply dysfunctional, you’re not going to be open to the evidence showing that children who grow up with gay parents are no worse off than children who grow up with straight parents. Likewise, if you believe it as intrinsically and immutably true that you have nothing going for you, winning the Nobel Peace Prize wouldn’t convince you otherwise — no matter what you’d done to earn it, you’d feel even guiltier for having “stolen” the award from someone more deserving.

When I discussed this column with a friend from high school, he expressed his conflict as trying to convince himself that he should feel good about himself when it’s “objectively true” that he shouldn’t. “There isn’t really one measure that validates that belief,” he lamented — “that belief” being the simple self-affirmation that he is a decent guy with a lot to be proud of.

I was surprised to hear that, not because I was under the impression that my friend was confident, but because I know he was raised to put way too much stock in the Magic Invisible Success-O-Meter that tallies up your accomplishments to determine whether or not you’re a valuable human being by arbitrary standards.

This guy — as I then reminded him, gently and with two highly raised eyebrows — has two things most people consider to be worth a lot of points on the Success-O-Meter: an Ivy League degree and a job in his field. Those are two things that I don’t have — one of which I almost definitely never will — and yet my friend seems to think that I’m doing pretty well with my life while he isn’t. This is because the Success-O-Meter, and the standards we create to ensure that we’re always scoring lower than we think other people are scoring, are utterly impervious to reason.

Many of us resist change, no matter how positive, and for some reason few changes are as terrifying as letting go of the cold, prickly security blanket that is hating everything about yourself. During the first stage of the transition you won’t know you’re making, you will probably hate yourself for starting to like yourself, adding “secretly conceited” to your never-ending list of flaws. But when you finally emerge on the other side, you will look back at the wild-eyed determination with which you clung to the manufactured certainties that made the last few years of your life so miserable, and it will rival your worst ex-boyfriend in terms of things you should have let go a long time ago.

Contact Tracey at tbh15@pitt.edu.