Note from Tash: Nadz is incredibly good at articulating herself and has been asked to see me after school for Self-Esteem Detention.
Self-esteem is accepting what you cannot change, having the courage to change the things you can and having the wisdom to know the difference.
Arrogance is thinking nothing needs changing.
TASH
I get asked the arrogance question a lot, usually by slightly sneery TV journalists who think it’s funny to say, ‘Some people would argue that young people today have too much confidence and no respect for their elders – they don’t need a self-esteem class, they need a big dose of humility. Bring back the cane, I say!’ *mwahhahahaha SNARF SNARF SNARF*.
Let us be clear: self-esteem means having the confidence to be yourself, whether you are naturally outgoing or more reserved. The person with the most confidence in a room isn’t necessarily the loudest or the person who is quickest to challenge authority. Sometimes, the person with the highest self-esteem is the one who can just sit and listen to what everyone else is saying and take a moment to enjoy being alive.
When I was at my lowest, self-esteem wise, I was an absolute bitch. I used to walk around with my nose in the air, pouting, judging everyone else and secretly wondering why no one liked me. I used to seek attention in the worst possible ways because I didn’t care why everyone was looking in my direction, just so long as I was the focus.
From the outside, I have no doubt that people thought of me as ‘arrogant’, yet all I wanted was to feel like it was OK to be me and that I could relax. I remember saying to my dad, ‘I just want to be someone,’ and him looking confused and replying, ‘But you are someone, love.’ And that was the issue: I couldn’t see that I was even a person – I felt like an angry mess of pent-up emotions and incidents of fuckuppery, surviving from moment to moment.
Self-esteem doesn’t just give you the confidence to strive for the things you really want, it’s also what allows you to be content with what you have. Self-esteem is the thing that makes you understand what drives and motivates you, to be genuinely happy for other people’s triumphs and to forgive yourself, learn and move on from your failures. (It is also sexy. FACT.)
Gaining self-esteem was, for me, realising that I am truly unique, brilliant and special… and so is everyone else.
In essence, you can never have too much self-esteem and anyone who tells you differently doesn’t actually understand what it is. So there.
NADZ
At the first school I ever taught in with The Self-Esteem Team, a Year 9 student came up to me after my lesson to say, ‘I don’t feel right,’ before bursting into tears. I just hugged her and tried to tell her that everything was going to be OK. While I can never know exactly how it feels to be in her shoes, I understand what it’s like to feel as though your skin doesn’t fit and that you are grotesquely abnormal from the rest of society.
But what the hell is normal anyway? And if we can’t answer that, how do we know what abnormal is? Let’s say that not feeling right is when you feel different from how you’ve been feeling in life up until that point. So that would mean that feeling abnormal doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. In fact, feeling abnormal is really normal because it happens to every human at some stage. You’d need to feel abnormal from time to time in order to be normal, which means we’re all really normal… this explanation sounds normal in my head but not so normal written down… The more I type ‘normal’, the more it sounds less normal. ARGH! Is it normal to write ‘normal’ so much in one normal paragraph?!! #normal
Epic brain fart.
Seriously though, you can only feel what you feel. Emotions aren’t by choice; in fact, they are the very opposite. Feelings stick to you with zero choice at all, whizzing around your brain at a million miles per hour. What is your choice is how you then deal with them, whether you allow them to consume you or whether you choose to conquer them. So when you feel like something is not right, that’s OK. It’s the steps you take after that count.
It feels horrible when someone asks ‘What’s wrong?’ when all you can think is ‘What’s right?’ Yet what you can do is learn how to manage your feelings by sowing seeds of confidence, instead of weeds of doubt, in your brain.
First, know that difficult emotions are a flaw in chemistry, not in character, so try not to beat yourself up. Second, you are not weird. Promise. Depression, self-doubt and insecurities all stem from feelings, which we all have (even people who seem secure). Third, it’s about programming the mind to realise you can, rather than believing you can’t.
TASH
When people say they don’t ‘feel right’, what they usually mean is, ‘Something’s wrong, but I don’t know what it is.’
You’d be surprised by how many people experience a kind of general ‘blah’ type feeling but can’t attribute it to anything specific. One of two things then happens:
1 They either try to make how they are feeling fit something – anything that’s happened recently (‘My friend’s budgie has early-onset diabetes and I’m just so cut up about it!’).
2 They convince themselves they don’t have the ‘right’ to ‘feel sorry for themselves’ and try to swallow down their emotions and soldier on.
Both of these tactics are diversionary – they stop you from getting to the root of the problem and mean that whatever it is that’s really bothering you will fester and grow.
If you feel insecure, or are behaving in ways you don’t recognise or like (like flying off the handle or sulking if you don’t get your own way), it means you have sunk into bad habits. Habits are powerful because they are so subtle; they creep up on us. We repeat negative patterns of thought or behaviour without really being aware that we’re doing it, then, before we know it, we ‘don’t feel right’ but we have no idea why.
There’s a couple of ways you can combat this. The first is to try to identify how the habit started. This is useful because, if you can cast your mind back to what was happening during the time you started to think or behave in negative ways, it’ll give you a massive hint as to what’s bugging you.
Human beings have ‘defence mechanisms’ built into us, which make it easier for us to cope with difficult situations while they are actually happening. So you can be going through something that should technically be difficult to deal with – like a bereavement or a break-up – and think ‘Hey! I’m dealing with this so well. Check me out being all mature and shit!’ but actually, your defence mechanisms have kicked in, meaning you’re having a sort of out-of-body experience. When this happens, we put all the toxic emotions we don’t want to deal with into a box at the back of our minds, to be reopened at a later date, when everything has settled down. So it can be weeks, months or even years later when those emotions re-emerge and it’s so unexpected that you’re left thinking, ‘What The Actual F?’
Equally, however, it could be nothing like as dramatic as that. And that’s also fine. You can’t help how you