The Easily Swayed Self Words Have Power

As we grow older, we desperately search for a sense of self. It begins from a simple question asked by our parents, relatives, teachers; question "What are you going to become?" Ever since this question is asked for the first time in our lives, we desperately search and try to identify a sense of self; a purpose in life. Human beings prioritize themselves first; nothing is wrong with that, but we also tend to put a lot of pressure on ourselves. The constant worry of what am I going to do with my life is something many teens and young adults face every day.

So, what is even self-esteem? I believe self-esteem is how a person perceives oneself; the amount of love, care, hatred you think you think you deserve. You estimate yourself and see how much potential you have to be someone or to do something. But in reality, we compare ourselves with our peers, siblings, and everyone we perceive to be better; for there can’t be two people equally good at something right? One must be the winner.

It is not our fault, we have been reared by our parents, our teachers, and the society to constantly compare and compete with. The moment we are born we start competing, people start estimating our worth straight out of our mother s womb, sometimes even earlier on. It’s been so normalized that it’s scary. We focus so much on the estimation part that we forget the first initial word, a word called "self".

Self means yourself, it does not mean competing with others, it does not mean competing with yourself as well. lt just means that you decide your values, your own goals, your limitations and you can be free to follow or not follow it because your self-estimation, your self-worth is completely personalized and should be only by you, for you. I know it’s easy to ask people to ignore the outside world’s perspective. But, intrinsically we desperately cling to other people’s opinions, especially people who we respect because it fills us up and acts as extrinsic motivation. We self-estimate them so much in our perspective that when they compliment us, we get the compliment plus coming from a person whose self-worth we highly regard is like a bonus. We treat people differently based on their self-worth we and most people do the same to us.

I like when people compliment me as most people do, but nowadays I try to separate the actual statement (compliment) from the other person’s self-worth in my regard. My self-esteem would love it if a person called me pretty but even more so if it was a person I regarded as pretty or important. It’s the same compliment yet a different reaction, Why?

With exposure and experience, I am now trying to renew my self-esteem and see things in a new light, seeing people without their price tag! When I was younger, the moment I hit my teen years (1 2- 1 3) my self-esteem would always be easily swayed. The most damaging thing to my self-esteem was people’s comments; especially people who meant a lot to me. Our own families might tease us for being too fat, too skinny, too dark, not getting good marks and we all laugh it off thinking it's light-hearted fun but it isn’t. We all are victims to it as well as predators of it. Our subconscious is always listening and those thoughtless comments which slowly begin manifesting consciously or unconsciously. I remember when I unintentionally said something that hurt someone’s self-esteem. I used to tease my sister for having small toes calling them “little potatoes”; no harm done. She would be slightly annoyed but mostly laugh it off, but soon thereafter she would be seen wearing socks at all times even while sleeping. Later she confessed she felt insecure about it; I realized I had been the cause of it. l had said all of that and the result was a crack in my sister s self-esteem caused by me. It took months to get her not to wear socks and she is still conscious about it. If I could go back in time, I would never say it, but I can't go back in time. All I can do now is be mindful of my words.

So many people in my life, have a link between something they were told in their childhood and their insecurities. The only thing I ask of you and to myself is to be more mindful of words You never know the amount of impact you might have on someone and their self-esteem.

By: Tshering Doma
Tashi Namgyal Academy