I have begun doing cover letters for my papers before I actually write them. It gives me a chance to warm up and as well as serving as a freewriting/brainstorming, it also lets the reader see some of my thinking that went into the way that I wrote the paper. It is arguable that this work should be hidden from the reader and all important information should be worked into the paper, and if you are a person who believes like this, I recommend that you skip this letter and go straight to page one of the paper.
The biggest problem that I have had in writing this paper is that I have almost no memories of my childhood from around my Junior year of high school back. I do not know why. I had very traumatic experiences in high school and junior high that might be the cause of it, or I might just have a bad memory. I really do not know.
For this reason, I have a very hard time forming a concept of continuity over the whole of my life. I do not have a childhood except for a few vague memories that are built primarily from stories that I have been told. I remember a few things from high school, but anything before my Junior year is like remembering seeing an actor in a play; I have no connection with that person as a human. He might as well have been an actor on a television show that I watched.
I plan for this paper to be disjointed and I am letting go of my usual requirements on my writing that it flow and form a coherent whole. I do not understand a coherent whole in the case of my life, and I would rather look at the individual pieces and try to understand them in that context, rather than try to form a holistic picture and perhaps corrupt my information by forming artificial connections. I, as an acclaimed rational thinker, do not hold the professional opinion that I have enough information to try to build a model just yet.
I think that the best course for this paper is anecdotal accounts ordered not chronologically, but by order of magnitude.
Perhaps the earliest situations that I remember that were hard on my self-esteem were sometime when I was maybe seventh or eighth grade. I was a sedentary child, spending most of my time reading or playing on the computer, though I did play outside with the kids next door sometimes. I was overweight. I do not remember being extremely overweight, but I was fat enough that it attracted the attention of my parents. (I remember being concerned enough about my weight that I would pull my pants up over my stomach so that the waistline would push my stomach in. Even before anyone said anything about my weight, people asked about why I wore my pants so high. I never told them; I always acted like I didn't know what they were talking about.) My dad wanted to get me concerned about my weight, and one of the ways that he tries to manipulate people is by directly pulling strings. So, he started telling me that I was fat (not in a kindly manner) and making fun of me. I have seen him do similar things with my brothers over the years. I think that it lets him express his concerns without having to be open and honest about it. (I want to forgive my father. I don't want to see him as a cruel and viscous man, and I don't think that he is.) I was very self-conscious about how I looked.
A time that I remember getting a real boost to my self-esteem came just last semester. I had never been involved in a romantic relationship before, even though I had tried (half-heartedly) before. Over the summer I had been pursuing a girl who I had been interested before, and like before she was not willing to pursue a romantic relationship. When I was returning to school I hoped (dreamed really, I did not consider myself romantically attractive) to perhaps get involved with a girl who I knew through the Honors Program and with whom I had been semi-flirting with during the previous semester. One night about two weeks into the semester she asked me to come out to the park with her, and she asked me to start dating her. I was extatic. I had on that night my first real kiss, and I started to push through a mass of not being worthy of being loved that had held me back for a very long time. I was working for an Honors 101 teacher, and one day in the next week, while I was sitting in the class he asked me if I had recently started going out with anyone, and he told me that I was glowing. (I really was glowing. I glowed at everyone and everything for a couple of days; it was really cool.)
One of the symptoms that I recognize of low self-esteem in my life shows up over and over again in my dealings with other people. I have had (and still do to some extent, though I am trying to deal with it) absolutely no self-efficacy. In the irrational rationality of my mind I consider myself to be a non-person. The only way that I can get anything that I want is to wait for someone else to give it to me. If I act, that action will be used against me. I am very afraid of trying to create opportunities for myself.
There have been times in my life when I was so certain of my absolute lack of worth as a person that I would not offer help to another person because I thought that they wouldn't want me to help them. It was the mere fact that I was me that made me not worth being around. I should not have existed.
A big part of my low self-worth is related to my experiences in high school and junior high. A rumor started that I was gay (I can describe the incident in detail, but I have done that several times elsewhere and if you are interested in knowing I can point you to it) and because of this I was ostracized from everyone that I knew and my name became synonymous with faggot.
I remember during high school several different thoughts that I tried to hold on to. One was that I would lay in bed at night and imagine getting a gun and going into the school and killing the people who tormented me every day. Then I would kill myself, after all what did I have to lose? I also remember thinking that all of the pain that I was suffering was a gift from God that someday I would use the tremendous strength that it took just to stay alive and I would do some awesome work with it. Sometimes though, there was simply no end to the aloneness. I was meant to suffer for no other reason than the simple fact that I was me.
I have been very successful at making it on teams of various sorts and becoming involved with various organizations. I am a very talented person vocally and intellectually and to some extent athletically, and I have been on several elite teams for various things. One of the groups that was most important for me was a traveling youth choir called Salt and Light. S&L was a really big opportunity for me to boost my esteem, because it was a very close knit group there was a spoken commitment by every member of the group to support the others. I have never felt more accepted in a group than with them. Even after I skipped out on a concert and declared myself an atheist they were still there for me.
I have been thinking about my self-esteem and self-efficacy a lot lately. I have begun to see that the world is not so much a product of what it is as it is a product of what I decide that it will be. I am not stricken with low self-esteem, I choose the life that I am going to live and the person that I am going to be. I am still very afraid and it is very hard for me to be hurt, but I am beginning slowly to make some changes I think.
I think that low self-esteem affects my actions in several ways. One of the biggest is emotional detachment. This is not entirely related to low self-esteem related, a good part of emotional detachment is my strong belief in rational systems, but my inability to control my emotional detachment is, I think, related to low self-esteem. I like defining things so that I can see the places where I am hiding statements, so emotional detachment is, for me, times when I look at things rationally, and while I may accept values, this process is not "loaded" with emotion. I believe that my inability to control when I detach, combined with a limited emotional range (I have not lost control of myself either in anger or in laughter or in crying for as long as I can remember) are symptoms of what is called frozen affect. This fact is of little importance to me other than it gives me a place to look to find possible perspectives. Regardless, the important fact is that I detach very often from relationships with other people and it is very hard for me to care about anyone. Last night, a friend of mine was hurting very badly and it was very difficult, as I got uncomfortable with the emotion that he was showing, not to stop caring about him and say "it's his problem, let him deal with it. I don't care." I was talking to a friend who also has a problem with emotional attachment and we were discussing the processes that go through. His is different from mine in that he simply goes very analytical and says that the other person can logically deal with whatever just happened. I, on the other hand, stop caring about the person. I don't say that they are not hurting or that they don't have the right to hurt, simply that I don't care about them.
I have noticed (and had pointed out to me) a self-centeredness that I have. I have trouble maintaining a focus outside of myself and how I think and how I feel. I do not think that I am a cruel person or that I am shallow (most of the time.) Even this question is very hard to define, because I do not understand what I am doing differently from other people. Am I a caring person? Yes. Do people matter to me? Yes. Am I always aware of other people's feelings? No. In terms of the MBTI am I just a "T" who gets locked into analysis and forgets to pay attention to "F"'s (my friend and I who have trouble with attachment were talking last night after our mutual friend who is a "F" had a breakdown and left the room, and he said, something along the lines of "Dammit we just broke the 'F.'") This is a picture that I do not like. I place a lot of value in feelings and emotions and I am fighting the idea that I am naturally without them. Perhaps that is my problem.
To get back to the autobiographical side of this paper (you didn't know that there was supposed to be another one, did you? I like doing things as I see fit; papers especially.) I am trying to remember scenes from childhood that impacted me. I remember in elementary school that I discovered that when I had to go to the bathroom I could sneak off to a wooded section of the playground and pee on the rocks. And that eventually I went off to go to the bathroom one day and somehow I got caught, but I don't remember how I felt about it, other than I thought that everyone was being silly; making such a big fuss about peeing.
I remember standing outside in freezing weather (literally the mid-teens) waiting on my parents to come and pick me up because I was too scared to ask anyone to give me a ride home after I worked with them setting up a concert hall. I remember thinking that I was going to freeze to death out there and I was thinking that all I had to do was ask someone for a ride and I could have gotten one, and I couldn't really figure out why people scared me so much.
I remember sitting in the hall, alone as usual, in the morning, waiting for my teacher to come and open the door so that I could sit in the classroom, and I decided that I wasn't a horrible person and all that I had to do was talk to people. And a guy that I kinda knew (like I kinda knew everybody) came down the hall and I said "Hi" to him and I was really proud of myself.
I remember going into Mr's Brown's class and sitting in front of Donnie Love and he would write in permanent marker all over the back of my neck and all over my shirt. And I remember thinking that if I could just go to sleep it would be like I wasn't there and they wouldn't have anyone to pick on and they would forget about me. By my senior year, I had formed part of my identity around sleeping and everyone knew that I slept through class all the time and I was proud of it and I liked having something to talk to people about. I was literally asleep more than I was awake at school my senior year.
I remember McClellan's science class and I would go in there and I would fall asleep and Josh Hubble would sit behind me and put chewing gum in the pocket of my coat and in my hair.
I remember leaving science one day and I was walking down the stairs and Cameron said to some guy, "hey, you see that guy, his name is Will Holcomb, he's a faggot. Go beat him up." And the guy jumped down the stairs separating us and landed punching me in the back of the head. I ran away.
I remember standing outside of Cameron's locker and he was saying stuff to me that he didn't really mean it and he was just joking when he said mean things to me, and I was filled with rage. I started hitting him in the stomach (even now I can feel the anger.) Cameron was the one person who I really wanted to kill. When I lay in bed and dreamed of taking a gun to school, he and I were the ones that I killed.
I remember when Sarah agreed to go out with me, and I couldn't hardly wait for gym class the next day when I could tell the guys that I had a date. And I did and they acted like it wasn't anything.
I remember waiting and waiting and waiting countless days for my mother to come and work a way to pick me up into her schedule. I remember never talking to anyone.
I remember times (even last week) that as I was walking I changed where I was going so that I wouldn't have to walk by someone and say "Hi." I remember today seeing a girl that I knew in the cafeteria and I didn't say "Hi" because I was afraid.
I remember talking to my parents and I just started to fall apart and cry and cry about how everyone at school thought that I was gay and that no-one would talk to me. And I remember them sending my little brothers out of the room and no more.
I remember hating my mother. I remember not being able to say anything to her without us fighting. Really fighting, really wanting to hurt the other person, and I remember that I wouldn't do anything that she told me to do, because I wanted to be my own person and she wanted to control me.
I remember going up at the altar call at Resurrection and praying the best that I knew how that God please show Himself to me. My youth minister came up behind where I was kneeling and put his hand on my shoulder, and I was very uncomfortable, because God wasn't there for me and I thought that I was lying to him.
I remember stealing a Penthouse magazine from the hotel bookstore and I took it and hid it in the top of the barn. And I remember, when the material in it ceased to arouse me, thinking that I had acclimated myself to sexuality and had irrevocably destroyed any possibility of a mature adult sexual relationship. I lamented this for a good long while.
I remember getting a subscription to Playboy when I was 11 years old and being in the Junior High locker room and telling the joke with something about a female blond having a higher sperm count than a male (this was the late 80's, blonde jokes were in) and having to explain it to people. And I remember that the main reason that I told my joke was so that I could say that I got it from Playboy, and of course gay people don't have a subscrition to Playboy.
Mainly I remember a lot of being alone and making myself be alone. I didn't want to lean on people, because I didn't think that I was worth caring for. I have had a very interesting life, and should I ever remember it all (or at least a good bit) I think that I will write a very interesting book.
Hope that you have had as much fun as I have. I started remembering lots of things a little while ago, and if you can see the transition I just was writing them down as they came up.