Sunday Poser # 36

This week Sadje’s question deals with our self esteem:

Do you appreciate yourself, your good qualities, your successes and your positive abilities?

These are a bunch of questions rolled into one. But seriously, it amounts to the same thingIf you put someone down often enough, they begin to believe they are not worthy of knowing and try to blend in with the paintwork rather than mix with people.
I chose ‘You have to Love me for What I am’ by The Carpenters for Jim’s Thursday musical challenge last week and the lyrics were quite true for me.
How often have we tried to be what someone else expects us to be? Or pretend to be something we’re not just to keep the peace? Or behave in a manner only acceptable to those with the most to gain?
I’ve been there and lost my identity and self esteem because of it, firmly believing I was worth less than something you’d scrape off your shoe because the guy I was living with threw five years of his resentment at me in as many minutes and I couldn’t handle it.

I used to say at school ‘I love Me because nobody else does’ and for a teenager that was a pretty sad statement. But things came full circle way back in 1987/1988 and I had to find reasons to love myself because where I was living, nobody else did. It took a year to rebuild my life and get out of the relationship, mainly because I had responsibilities and knew after I left there would be no going back.

So to Sadje’s question, do I appreciate myself?
The answer is yes, I do now more than ever. I am not the horrible woman I believed I was, or the bad person some may have painted me to be. I have a lot of things going for me, and a spouse who loves me for what I am.
I like to think I am liked in the community here and have true friends, not sycophantic hangers on who only wanted my friendship for their convenience.

I’ve said it before in my blog, I genuinely care about people, but appreciate I do not, and cannot, have all the answers to all their problems, but I can listen if they need to talk.
I am what my Dad would call an OK brick, and I don’t think you can get something much more solid than that.