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I’ve spent a large...okay massive part of my life...okay! My whole life, damn, trying to be the best. I wanted to be the best at singing, at dancing and reading and writing and pretty much anything else. Any time I watched a movie with a female lead with a kickass job, I’d think, “Hey, I could totally do that, if I wanted to.” I can be an Elle Woods lawyer, or a Meredith Grey doctor, or a Sandra Bullock FBI agent. Every time I watched a “powerful woman” movie, I would spend the next couple of weeks wanting to be that thing. I’d research how to get started in that field, and where I could get the education I needed, and I knew that I would be the best lawyer/doctor/FBI agent the world had ever seen. Then after a few weeks, I’d lose interest or watch a different movie and go on to try to become the best at that thing.

Now hear me out, I’m not saying that I couldn’t do those things, or that I couldn’t possibly be the best at them. But wanting to be the best weighed on my shoulders more and more with every new dream career I’d have. I have 3 siblings, all of whom went to college, and graduated with a degree in something they really really wanted to do.

I took a gap year, thinking I’d go straight into the workforce and see what I wanted to do by starting at the bottom. Entry level jobs could show me the ladder I could climb by first going to college. Eventually I missed being in school (if you’ve taken a gap year that wasn’t centered around learning, you’ll understand) where I was learning every day and constantly working to improve myself. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I went to community college for mechanical engineering, because that was something I’d always been interested in. Then I switched to history, with plans to go to law school. I switched a few more times until I had gotten enough credits to earn a degree. The degree I ended up with was an Associate’s degree in University Studies. Basically a piece of paper saying “You took some classes here.”

I tried many more things after that. Went to a semester at a four year school for International Business, did sales jobs, teaching music, nannying, restaurants, hookah lounges, call centers, you name it. But I was always over-incumbered by these giant weights that I had put on my shoulders of needing to be the best. I worked multiple jobs at a time, hoping to succeed by sheer numbers alone. The anxiety ended up getting to me and I wound up in the hospital. I went to a group therapy center after being discharged and wound up making an insane realization that I had never thought of before. You paying attention? Here it is:

We don’t have to be the best at everything.

We don’t have to be the best at ANYTHING. 

As long as we’re enjoying what we’re doing, and trying our hardest, who cares what ‘place’ we’re in?

As soon as that entered my mind, my shoulders relaxed, and so much of the anxiety I’d been carrying fell to the ground in heaps. I felt as though I’d been lifted out of a tar pit. I could move freely, I could think about things uninhibitedly.

Now I’m not trying to say that wanted to be the best is bad, or that anyone should stop trying their hardest because being the best isn’t important. The message of this blog post is that the pressure you’re feeling to be better than everyone else is misplaced. If you’re going to put pressure on anything, why not putting it toward finding the things you enjoy the most? It’s like when you’re a kid and the teacher says whoever has the most fun, wins. Although I’m aware that this is a cop-out so that teachers don’t have to keep score, it rings true for me, and it has turned my whole life around.

Hey readers, today I’d like to talk about a rule that I established for myself long ago: Always take your own car to a first date. Regardless of your gender, if you have never met a person (such as in a blind date, Tinder date, dating website), ALWAYS take your own car. This is an experience that I had while going through a “I’m a single girl who can date whomever she wants” phase, henceforth known as SGP (Single Girl Phase). 

While it is true that dating is fun and everyone is free to date whomever they want, I was doing it in a slightly unhealthy way. When I got out of high school, I had only had one boyfriend, and it had been very serious. Well, as serious as a high school relationship can be. And even though my high school boyfriend was not, by any means, a horrible person, I always had a constant fear, that one day it was all going to turn out to be an elaborate prank, and he was just dating me as part of some kind of dare. Sort of a Carrie, Dogfight, Pig Party kind of thing. Of course this wasn’t true, but it is a good illustration of my self-esteem in and coming out of high school.

Alright, now that my dating attitude has been established, let’s get into the story. I once met a guy on Tinder, let’s call him Jacob. Jacob came to pick me up from my house, came to the door, and picked me up. I was living with my parents at the time, so he met my parents, nothing too interesting happened there. Then we went out to the car. 

As soon as we got in the car, the truck actually, things started to go weird. I got into the passenger seat, and I heard a weird elongated whoosh sound. I looked over, and there was Jacob, breathing as hard as he could, into the breathalyzer that the police had installed on his car. He then lit up a cigarette and started the car, as the breathalyzer had come up alcohol-free. Now at this point, I feel like a reasonable person would’ve gotten out of the car, but I was so flattered that someone on Tinder had liked me, and there was a voice in the back of my head telling me that I was lucky to even be on this date, so I stayed put.

The rest of the date was very strange. We went to Sonic, which was closed, because he was not hungry so he didn’t think we needed to stop and eat. So we just parked at an empty Sonic and we sat on the tailgate of his truck and he started talking. And when I say talking, what I really mean is excruciatingly oversharing. By the end of the date I knew all about his very dark childhood, and his relationship with his parents, and his brothers and sisters, his drug and alcohol problem, not to mention all of the cigarettes he smoked while we were sitting there. By the way, he talked about his drug and alcohol problem not as a problem for his health or his lifestyle, but more as a problem of getting caught and further bothered by the police. 

We then kissed, and Jacob took me home and did not walk me to the door. Nope, he stayed in his truck and drove away as soon as I got out, not even checking to make sure I could get into the house.

It was a terrible date, and I had an absolutely terrible time. But due to my views of myself, when he asked for a second date, I went. We went on two more dates in fact, until I finally came to my senses and realized that if I wasn’t having a good time with him, I should just not spend time with him. 

Hello readers, I’m glad to see you (metaphorically), whether you were seeking out my profile in particular, looking for a blog on self esteem, or just came across this page while randomly typing nonsense into your search bar. Welcome *dramatic pause* to my blog: Self Esteem is 2020! In a nutshell, this blog is about my self esteem, self-doubt, and shame, and the (oftentimes ridiculous) situations in which I find myself because of them. 

A little about me, I am 24F, pronouns she/her, and I have Bipolar 1 Disorder. In case you don’t know what that is, think of it is a big ball of anxiety, depression, over-excitement, excess energy, zero energy, and random mind explosions out of nowhere. Wrapped up in an invisibility cloak that no one else can see. I’ve had plenty of victories and many more pitfalls when it comes to self-esteem, and I’d like to share it with... strangers? I don’t know, sharing it with “THE WORLD” just seems a little delusions-of-grandeur-esque (totally a word). Anyway, here I am.

I am almost entirely certain that everyone has experienced a thing I like to call “Post-Interaction Confident Comeback Lament” or “PICCL” (pik-uhll) for short. This is the all-too-common occurrence that happens when we’re lying in bed at night or driving home from work, when we have a sudden epiphany along the lines of “Aw, man! I should’ve said/done *insert strong response to whatever happened here*!!” It has happened to me countless times, and continues to happen to this day. I’ve made bounds of improvement, but my self-esteem is nowhere near where I want it to be.

So, that about sums it up. Welcome to the blog!