Growing up, I struggled with really bad self-esteem issues. Through middle school and half of high school, I couldn't look in the mirror without a string of self-deprecating thoughts attacking my brain. Getting dressed in the morning usually ended up sitting on the floor crying because I thought I wasn't pretty enough to go out.
After dealing with this for four years, I was determined to change my mindset. Three years later, I'm at a completely different place. I can look in mirrors and see someone who is beautiful. Someone who has been through hell but has come back stronger. Someone who actually doesn't hate everything in her life.
The thing no one realizes about self-esteem is how important it is to actually love yourself. If you don't love yourself, you can't love others.
Looking back, there are so many relationships I missed out on because I couldn't love anyone. I couldn't love myself, and I couldn't see why anyone else would want to. I didn't understand why anyone would want to be friends with me. I was so far into this pit that I just assumed everyone thought about me the same way I thought about myself. It wasn't until a bible study the summer before my junior year that I was shown that I was wrong. I didn't know why I went or kept going even after I felt like I didn't quite fit in.
But through this bible study and the encouraging of the different girls I was surrounded by, I was shown that what I was perceiving as dislike from others was actually just a reflection of the dislike of myself.
Climbing out of the depth isn't easy, but it is possible. High school wasn't easy; I was surrounded by the same people I had been through my whole life, but it was easier to transform myself when new people arose from those all-too-familiar settings. College made it even easier. I was completely uprooted and surrounded by people I didn't know and who didn't know me.
It's easier to become friends with people when you can forget about what happened before them. But you don't forget. It still lingers a little. Friendships grow apart, rejection happens, and not everyone gets along, and these things can tend to dig up the past, but that is where a form of inner strength and amazing people can help you avoid the slope back down.
As a person who has a tendency to keep too much private, to not talk enough about issues, I suppose this article is my form of talking. Self-esteem issues aren't always the easiest to talk about. In a way, they are incredibly common, it seems just natural that they come with puberty, but no issue is the same.
Everyone shows things different, is affected differently, and finds comfort differently. It's okay not to be okay, and it's okay if you don't want to talk about it, but talking does help. It took me three years to tell one person and another three years to tell people who I should've told from the beginning.
One more thing before you exit out of this article: a huge part of what kept me quiet for so long was the constant bugging thought in my mind that someone else has it worse. It's true. There is always someone going through more or experiencing worse in their life than what you are in yours.
But that's not your life, it's theirs. You cannot equate your pain to that of others. The worse in your life could be the best in someone else's life, but that does not make your struggles invalid. Every hurt is valid. Nothing makes you less important than anyone else.
