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UniVersal: Foreword, Goals and Self-Esteem

Started by Verse, April 10, 2011, 11:20:57 AM

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Verse

I don't write exceptionally well outside of a roleplay environment. It's a strange paradox, but while I consider myself at least on the above average spectrum of wordsmiths, that's for in character. Outside of that, I don't organize my thoughts and ideas well. I always struggle with wording my own mind and giving my soul it's own voice. So I've never written a blog before in my life, at least not one I would actually put those words I keep wanting to say into context. I don't outlet much, I don't talk about my days or my nights in detail and I certainly don't provide an intimate window into my life or my emotions.

Because in all reality, giving an outlet for my feelings and soul in recent months would have resulted in nothing more than the words 'Help me, please'. Repeated a thousand times over fifteen paragraphs with me stone faced at the keyboard unable to stop myself until I'd hit the post limit for whatever blog I was writing, then I delete the entire thing and refuse to repeat the experience ever again. I don't mean to be melodramatic but it's the truth and mentally that's how I picture most things going when I talk about myself. I expect most people not to care and not to hear me. And the rare ones who do break through that outer barrier, I cherish them so much and want them to stay so badly that I refuse to share the parts of myself that really need expression.

Everyone has a picture of themselves in their head. I picture myself surrounded by emptiness and darkness for most of my life. I have, in my mind, nothing that really matters in my life beyond the fact that I have it and arguably my family.

So please, forgive me if my writing meanders between light and dark at times. Getting things off my chest helps me and getting them out in this format is going to be difficult, but keeping things bottled up is just going to drive me mad.



Today, I want to talk about success and failure. How do you define them? I define success as setting a series of goals and reaching the final goal. I define success as not meeting a goal. It might not be the healthiest way to define one's ups and downs but it's how I choose to define it for myself. It's interesting to me to that I think this way because when I view someone else's life, I look at all their accomplishments and faults in lump piles and judge on a purely 'They're where they want to be' or 'They're not there yet' mindset.

For me, viewing my own life, it more falls into the 'I'm not there yet' or 'I'll never be there' categories.

For most of my life, particularly around the teenage years, I have struggled horribly with my self worth and image. I've been a victim of mental, emotional and physical abuses, some as a child and some later in my lifetime. And it gets very hard to not use curling up in a ball and sobbing yourself to sleep as a defense mechanism when you used it so much. It was, for a long time, my default response to anything stressful or difficult. The only time it wasn't was in my early teens when it manifested as horrible rages that took a combination of a therapist and age to curb. In the past few years I've found my center and my confidence has taken a dramatic turn for the better, though it still has it's struggles.

To give you an example of how bad I was some years ago, I would never have joined Elliquiy for fear of every single kink and preference I had, my writing style and even how I thought things out and designed them, being mocked and ridiculed if not in public than by everyone who saw and read it.

So to combine my fatalistic views of my own progress with self-esteem that is still in traction, I find it very hard to be proud of myself.

I find it very hard to be proud of the fact that I started a GED course at 18 years old and not only completed it in less than six months but passed my GED test on the first try in the top one percentile of the entire national average. And was incredibly popular with both my teachers and peers during my classes, was made one of two graduate speakers out of not just my own class but of all the graduates from several classes.

I find it very hard to be proud of the fact that I have my name published in the newspaper along with a close student friend of mine for both of us graduating after going through so much in our pasts. And incredibly hard to be proud of the fact I'm a member of the NAEHS, which stands for National Adult Education Honor Society. I did all this, after being expelled/dropping out of school after the 4th Grade for issues and literally self-teaching myself all of this after not caring about my education since.

If any of that seems like thinly veiled bragging, it isn't and that's the shameful part. I wouldn't feel bad about bragging about that if I wanted to. I would laugh and link my little newspaper article and hunt down some other information for sharing. But I actually feel a little ashamed to talk about it. Firstly, it feels like this is all so stupid that sharing it makes it sound like I have accomplished nothing else in my life and second, I want to curl up in my little ball and delete it all as I type it because I'm terrified someone will judge it.

And the sadder fact of it all is that I consider myself an educational failure, even with all that to be proud of. It certainly hasn't helped me get a job or get any semblance of a life and since graduating, I've done nothing with my GED. I was going to attempt to get into college but that has been put on hold for the foreseeable future and I blame myself for that entirely. In my own mind, I blame myself for every fault and praise everyone else for my every success and I can't seem to break out of that mindset for -anything-.