Self Esteem

There are all kinds of hints I pick up, mostly when I’m alone or have a quiet moment to contemplate my own strange psyche, that allude to a struggle with self esteem, or self worth, confidence, whatever you may call it. Be it the music I buy to temporarily fill a hole, or the social anxiety I create within me, and the struggle to remain on top of mounting work. Sometimes I point with absurd objectivity at my own self-destructive apathy towards due dates, projects, opportunities. I give myself ownership of this apathy, but in fact, it’s not mine in the sense of a characteristic. It’s a thing I create off and on, and in my most epiphanistic moments, I realize it for the scapegoat it is. With apathy comes lack of progress, depression, and when one is depressed, you’ve got a new problem to worry about so you don’t have to deal with the problems you’re really trying to avoid.

To illustrate my point allow me to tell you of a dream I had not long ago. It was a short dream (though I remember it clearly), more of a preview filling the space between two other dreams of feature length –neither of which I recall. At the time of this dream, in the real world, I liked a girl who by some strange effort of fate I had not been able to get to know yet. That is a story with a payoff not worth the length of the narrative, so I skip ahead; rest assured, I liked this girl. In the dream I was opening a can of tuna fish (solid white albacore tuna, in fact), presumably to make a sandwich, when the girl found me, finally. She was happy to see me so she gave me a hug and promised we’d meet up again soon. As I wrapped my arms around her it occurred to me how embarrassing it was that I was holding an open can of tuna fish.

In real life a similar experience had driven my passion for tuna into exile, when I climbed into the back seat of a friends car after having finished a delicious tuna fish sandwich just moments prior. Ten minutes into the journey the girl sitting next to me (an ex-special someone recently reconciled) asked the car in general if anybody had eaten fish. I mumbled some self-defense I can’t remember now and swore the next time I would brush my teeth and sing the ABCs four times as I washed my hands.

Returning to the dream, I felt strangely confident with the girl in my arms despite the albacore in my hand. She didn’t seem to mind the smell, and at least it wasn’t chunk light tuna in oil; now that would have been embarrassing.

Upon waking, I interpreted the open can of tuna fish to represent my short comings, or my quirks ¬–my little “defects” which set me apart and sometimes seemed to hold me back from becoming a greater version of myself. Something like that, but not exactly. While my can of fish was slightly unattractive, it was something I was comfortable with (albacore tuna vs. chunk light; perhaps forgetting to bring in the milk vs. alcoholism), and the girl I was hugging accepted me even if I might sometimes smell a little fishy.