#self-esteem

He thinks he's amazing, because he is.

His sense of his own value is a little fucked up, and tied up in demonstrating how amazing he is by fixing all serious problems and mocking all stupid ones, and when his methods stop working and he can no longer prove this to his own satisfaction he has a profound crisis about it, which he's still shaking off when we meet him.

But self-esteem is super very much not a thing he struggles with. He is a genius who received regular validation about his excellence in a form that satisfied him both as very a small child and from the ages of ~8 to ~17. He has a clear system of ethics which he is most of the time able and willing to act on; he feels really good about himself as a person whenever severe trauma is not actively making that very hard to do.

His default state is obnoxiously high self-esteem.

In-story accusations of arrogance are strictly speaking correct, it's just that most of the inferences about the rest of his character people draw from this trait are deeply wrong.

His willingness to self-destruct is at least as heavily wrapped up in his conviction that because he's so awesome and tough and clever he can handle things other people can't, as it is in the idea that he's disposable.

So yeah the thing is. He really genuinely actually did sacrifice himself for Jiang Cheng in part because he thinks he's better than Jiang Cheng. Stronger, braver, smarter. More adaptable.

And he was right! And Jiang Cheng knows he was right!

For a lot of people, no can feel like it means a whole lot of other more negative things: “I don’t like you,” “You are bad/unattractive,” “You are creepy.”

For whatever reason, we attach these meanings to a very simple idea: that the person just doesn’t want something at that moment. When we ask someone if they want to do something sexual (kissing⁠, stripping, oral sex⁠, intercourse⁠, whatever) we sometimes believe their answer has great implications on us as people; that it says something about our value or worth. This isn’t only false, but it is also essentially unfair to add our own, secret meanings to other people’s simple statements of preference. Unless the person you are trying to romance is the Riddler (in which case I can’t help you), it is unlikely they are trying to leave a trail of verbal clues you must decode to find their real meaning. Let the person talking decide their own words and meaning don’t do it for them.

Romance is a field where she's particularly susceptible to this because she has the patches and the invention credit and the bragging rights to prove she shines in so many areas but no concrete evidence that Phineas even recognizes her feelings, let alone reciprocates them.

Which is probably why she tries to move on when they get to high school— she can find success and praise in soccer and student government and all the other activities she involves herself with instead of chasing Phineas.

Of course, she's still heartbroken over Phineas at the end of the day because getting over him is an imperfect solution— the real root of the her self-esteem issues isn't some guy who won't notice her, it's her dependency on external validation. As long as she ties her self-worth to the way other people see her, "the one that got away" is always going to be stuck in the back of her mind as her greatest failure.

Cutting Phineas out of her life also means giving up a huge chunk of her support system, since a lot of her friends are also Phineas' friends. Phineas and the rest of the backyard gang see and love Isabella for who she really is, not the warped image of herself formed by her insecurities. And of course she's got other people who see and love her real self too, but that doesn't change the fact that distancing herself from some of her closest friends is an act of self-sabotage.