02009 New Year's Resolution #20: Something About Turning the Self-Deprecation Down a Notch

I should probably make this New Year's Resolutions 20 through 23. There's so much here that it probably deserves to be counted as at least four separate Resolutions. However, I'm going to just combine it all into one big one, so as not to unreasonably inflate my count.

My great tragic secret (which I've never really kept secret at all) is that for the last 20 years I have thought of myself as ugly, stupid, boring, undeserving of praise, and generally unworthy of love. Think of Stuart Smalley's Daily Affirmations and turn them on their head. That's essentially been my internal monologue for the last two decades. [I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. And gosh darn it, there's no conceivable reason why people should like me.]

I am constantly astonished that my darling wife ever fell for me, let alone that every day she's still here, still in love with me. This I have never been able to comprehend. Why me?

Well, 20 years is probably enough.

Being so down on one's place in the world does, I think, tend to skew one's world view, probably in a not-so-healthy way. For one thing, it tends to stifle ambition. Besides that, it probably has some significant social consequences. (When one assumes that others would not want to befriend someone as lowly as I have considered myself to be, that probably becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Somehow, I have managed to make some wonderful friends over the years, but this was probably despite myself.)

My twentieth New Year's Resolution of 02009 involves trying to work on my attitude towards myself.

I resolve to...
  • try to keep in mind that I am probably not always the ugliest guy in the room.

  • try to remind myself that the IQ tests and SAT scores and school grades, while no guarantee, have been consistently high enough that "stupid" very likely does not truly apply.

  • try to be encouraged (by the friends I have and by Beth's persistence in sticking around) that I may not be as boring as I have for so long believed. Perhaps there is something interesting about me after all.

  • try to be less dismissive of compliments; try to accept them at face value as being sincere instead of questioning the motives behind them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Bell Ringer Joke Revisited

or: If I'm Destined to Get a Pulitzer Prize for 02008, This is the Line of Thought That Will Earn It For Me I'm pretty sure that it's been at least two decades since the idea of The Bell Ringer Joke started knocking around in my head. (I've mentioned the joke in a previous blog post .) There has been hope and despair, laughter and great disappointment, spread out over more than half my lifetime! On Thursday morning, out of the blue, I had a few epiphanies regarding the joke for all of these years. Epiphany #1: The first and second parts of the joke are spectacular, and if I had not been told at the time that I first heard them that there was a mysterious third part floating about in the ether, those two known parts would have been deeply satisfying. There would have been no disappointment associated with The Bell Ringer Joke whatsoever. The two parts stand together as a complete and brilliant story, riotously funny. Which is to say that the third part is only relevant...
Read more

Avalanche

Image
This blog has been untouched for a great many months. In case anyone out there is subscribed, I'm posting this here. I've spent the last several months working in my too-rare spare moments on a video project that I consider to be the most important thing I've ever worked on in my life. But it only matters if people actually see it. It's scheduled to debut on YouTube at noon Eastern time this coming Wednesday (August 26). Please consider taking six minutes of your valuable time to watch it and then please, please, please consider sharing it as far and wide as you possibly can. Thank you. -L.
Read more

In Memoriam, Mark Cassorla

We just got back home last night from another vacation, this one to Texas. This vacation was interrupted by a side trip I had to make to bury my cousin Mark, who decided that he needed to kill himself on Monday morning. It's hard to express all of the feelings this has drudged up. But I feel as if it's somehow my responsibility to try to say something appropriately solemn. I always thought of Mark as "Marco". I'm not really sure whether this is because I grew up hearing other people calling him Marco or not. As I've mentioned before, I'm cursed with a horrible memory. So I honestly can't say whether anyone else ever called him Marco, although in my mind's ear, I can pretty clearly hear it rolling off his father's tongue. I'm also not sure whether I ever called him "Marco" to his face or whether the nickname resided strictly in my head. What I can say is that in some sense I always felt closer to Mark than I ever felt to any other ...
Read more