Everyone suffers from some self-doubt every now and then, it’s part of human nature. We don’t have absolute certainty of the outcome of every decision, but what happens when that doubt permeates all aspects of our life? What happens when each step we take is preceded (and often followed) by endless questions about its correctness? Well, that would be me. I am what happens.
Funny thing (not so funny, really) is, I didn’t recognize it as a problem until about two years ago. Sure, I knew it was there, but I didn’t know it was damaging me so much.
This is the story of the steps I took to fight it.
Table of Contents
The dawn of the problem
The process through which my self-esteem issues were born is a long and convoluted one. Explaining it fully would imply writing a book, not a blog article, and sharing personal information that I’m not willing to share on the internet. What I can do, though, is give you enough of a summary to help you recognize a pattern. If you’ve seen the same pattern in your life, know that you’re not alone, and we can work on it together.
Let’s start with my childhood. Like many others, I was bullied when I was a kid, but that was just the start. I think the first real nail on the coffin of my sense of self-worth was the isolation of my high school years, when the social validation that adolescence requires simply didn’t arrive. Since I was isolated in the years that are the most damaging to be isolated in, my mind filled the gap with its own explanation: there must be something wrong with me. Today I know it wasn’t the case, but it took a long time and years of therapy to get to this conclusion, and I still haven’t fully metabolized it.
It also didn’t help that I was always treated as a child by some of the people in my life, and I still am. When someone constantly tells me what to do when I already reassured them that I’m perfectly capable of handling things on my own, and then gets mad at me for not doing what they told me, that’s something that triggers my anger as very few things in life. Again, today I know how to manage it, but ten years ago? That was a message constantly telling me “you are not enough for this”.
Some things, I definitely could have done better. There have been times in my life when I managed to get in a social circle, only to find out the people in this circle were never genuinely happy about my presence, just barely agreeing to it. Guess what? That doesn’t do any good to your self-esteem, either.
Why did I do it, then? Well, when you’ve spent your teenage years in your room alone, with the people you trust the most telling you that you were alone because your personality was objectively wrong, you tend to decide that if you ever get the chance to enter a group of friends, you’ll do everything in your power to stay in such group. When I was 16 and alone I had no idea a social group could be wrong for someone, to the point to damage their mental health, but when I was 21 I was living that dynamic without realizing it.
All of these factors combined (and many more) made it so that the problem got so bad that I became essentially an outcast for many years. Today I am stronger than ever, but the price of my strength has been a huge amount of pain.
Cause and effect
The connection between loneliness and low self-esteem is not linear. They feed each other.
Loneliness convinced me, gradually, that I didn’t deserve company. That conviction reinforced the low self-esteem. The low self-esteem then made me stop trying — what was the point of reaching out when I already knew the result? So the loneliness deepened, and the cycle continued.
For years I didn’t pursue friendships or romantic connection because I had already decided the outcome. I wasn’t protecting myself from rejection. I was protecting a belief that had become so fundamental I couldn’t see it as a belief — I saw it as truth.
That’s what low self-esteem does at its worst. It presents itself as accurate assessment. You sabotage yourself to protect what’s hurting you the most.
Therapy, therapy, therapy
I’m willing to bet you have already anticipated what this paragraph is all about.
A couple of years ago, after moving to the city I currently live in, I started going to therapy again. One of the first issues my new therapist noticed in me was the total lack of self-esteem. It was nothing new to me, but it was the first time I saw it as a problem, something that was actively damaging me.
When I finally started examining it seriously, I began to see something I had been ignoring: the evidence. I had overcome significant challenges in my life: I had built things, learned things, survived things that required real capability. The narrative of worthlessness I had been carrying didn’t match the actual record of my life. I was just tricking myself into thinking I was worth nothing because that’s the lie I’d been fed all my life. Also, it’s way easier to believe that and never try to do anything worth a damn, rather than pushing yourself with a challenge.
That realization on its own didn’t do much, but it introduced a crack in the certainty. The dogma I had been holding — this is just what I am — turned out to be a conclusion, not a fact, and conclusions can be reconsidered.
Further down the line I also started another project: working on my physical condition. Watching my body change because of my efforts (diet, gym, karate) really did something for my self-esteem. When I stand in front of a mirror, with the right light and the right angle, and I see a six pack starting to appear, I am reminded of something undeniable: when I set a goal, I work toward it, and I get results. I am bombarding myself with this message the same way I have been bombarded with the wrong messages while growing up. And you know what? It’s working.
This doesn’t mean that the only way to get self-esteem is by getting shredded. Not everybody is wired the same, to me this is just a way to demonstrate myself that I can become the polar opposite of obese, which is what I’ve been for quite some time. What better way to improve myself than defeating an eating disorder and a laziness habit built during all my life? Sure, appearance is not everything, but you get a damn good feeling when you look at yourself and you like what you see.
This is, fundamentally, what I understood: when you make progress in defeating your personal demons, that’s where you can demonstrate to yourself, concretely, that your effort produces outcomes. That demonstration is what puts everything under a new light. It destroys your dogma.
Where I am now
Better. Significantly better. But not resolved.
I’ve corrected beliefs I held for decades. I’ve challenged assumptions that felt like bedrock and discovered they were just old conclusions. I’ve made real progress on something I once thought was simply part of my nature.
And yet: the architecture of who I am was built during years when these beliefs were present and unchallenged. They’re in the structure. I can work around them, compensate for them, reduce their influence — but I don’t think I’ll ever remove them entirely.
This is something I’ve had to accept. Low self-esteem, for me, will remain a long-term project rather than a problem to be solved. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m ready to fight this battle for the rest of my life, if I need to do so.
Don’t give in to the monster
The worst thing a person with low self-esteem can do is believe that it’s justified.
Low self-esteem doesn’t just make you “feel bad” — it actively prevents you from generating evidence against itself. If you believe you won’t succeed, you don’t try. If you don’t try, you don’t succeed. The belief becomes self-fulfilling, and then points to its own results as confirmation.
Of course, it’s not always like this. Sometimes people do try, and they do fail. This happens to me, to you, to the most successful folks on this planet, and it will still happen, but you don’t give your best when you’re already convinced you will fail.
This is a trap you can’t think your way out of. You can only act your way out of it by doing something, anything, that produces a result your lack of self-esteem can’t explain.
Your best weapons
Therapy is the starting point I’d recommend to anyone. It’s not going to necessarily solve the problem, but it gives you the tools to examine it clearly. It helps you understand where it came from, how to distinguish between beliefs and facts, and start questioning what you’ve been taking as an undisputable truth.
Beyond therapy: find something to work toward. Something concrete, measurable, that requires sustained effort. The goal itself matters less than the process — what you’re building is a track record, evidence that you can set a direction and move toward it. Every result that your low self-esteem can’t explain is a small chip in its foundation.
It’s slow. It doesn’t feel like enough while you’re doing it, but it compounds faster than you think. Also, you’ll be the last one to notice the changes. Even to this day, sometimes I look in the mirror and I think “Is that really me?”. I have demonstrated something to myself so fast that my perception didn’t have time to catch on.
This is how I know it’s working. This is how you’ll find out, too.