Love of Lights

Low self-esteem and its effects on my connection with others In my ever-persistent pursuit of becoming less broken, today I want to write about the effects of low self-esteem. I want to talk about its origins, its purpose, and how to combat it. I can't revolutionise how I think about myself in one blog post, but it can be a start. Where does my low self-esteem come from? I've been reading a book today called "The Courage to Be Disliked". For the first 30 or so pages, I found myself rolling my eyes, discomforted by how trite and intellectually unrigorous it seemed. However, I read on, because it's quite an easy read and is presented in a very digestible dialogue format. As I read on, some interesting things came up. For example, the book talks about how a feeling of inferiority (i.e., low self-esteem) comes from subjective interpretations of features of yourself. It sounds obvious, but it's worth remembering. Your opinion about yourself is not an objectiv...

Writing for my mental health I always begin these posts in the same way, but I do so because it's always true: I haven't written here in a long time. It's a problem. Adolescent and young-adult me were wise beyond their years. Writing down how I feel and trying to order my inner life is an invaluable task. When I don't do it, I tend to lose track of myself. The demands of daily life can easily occupy one's time so fully that you forget to check the pulse of your mental health. I certainly have. But I'm going to check in now. I want to talk about vulnerability. My fear of vulnerability and its negative consequences One of the hardest things about being human is navigating interpersonal relationships. It's no profound statement, but it's true. I think all of my deepest emotional wounds have been inflicted by something wrong happening in an interpersonal relationship. I can trace the biggest scars easily: I'm moved away from a group of friends I lo...

It's been quite a long time since I've written here. I've intended to myriad times over the past few months, but something has always held me back: either my belief that there will be antagonistic readers to what I have to write (as I've fallen out with close friends who I believe still have access to this blog -- I don't know if they would still bother to read it, though), or simply a kind of disconnect with myself that has plagued me over the past few months -- a disconnect that makes it difficult for me to sit and be introspective and touch upon anything useful or interesting. But the impulse has always been there: something within me that wants to express myself in prose, to gather my thoughts, to order my self. I'll try again now. Hold on; I'm gonna crack open a Guinness. I think I want to do an inventory on my life and internal affairs since having graduated from my masters in philosophy. Hey, that's a thing: I'm a master in philosophy now --...

I've just been tipped onto an idea by something my favourite poet said on his podcast recently. The idea is that whenever you are faced with the sense of being overwhelmed or whenever the Fear rises up in you, and threatens to make you and your life small, combat it in the following way: isolate the cause of the fear and describe how you can alleviate it. The key thing to remember, however, is that your natural instinct will be to simply get rid of the problem in the easiest way, which will probably mean avoiding rather than engaging with it. But you never improve at problem-solving by avoidance; you don't up your skill-level in that area. If anything, every time you get rid of a problem by avoiding it, you probably lose skill points in that area. You legitimise the fear, and you'll be even more scared of it the next time it comes around. This is why, as I've written on this blog before, it's important to embrace the fear, because fear is pointing you in the direc...

I wish I could be religious. Anybody that knows me knows I can't be religious -- I'm too philosophical, too invested in the truth to believe things on faith, to believe things without evidence. That sounds self-aggrandising, but really I just mean I withhold belief unless there're good reasons to believe. Religious people will argue that there are plenty of good reasons to have faith, and I don't deny them that, but in order for me to believe anything, the reason that "it is probably true" is a kind of necessary condition. I can't get myself to believe something if I simply think "it might be true" or "I can't prove otherwise". When I can only believe something to those latter degrees, I withhold belief until I have further reasons to strengthen my credulity. A lot of things in religious texts I don't believe because I think about them in relation to the work being done in the sciences, so I believe a mixture of, "it's ...

Procrastination is a killer. It kills success and potential happiness. It is the perfect companion to anxiety. It is a symptom of fear. As I've increasingly grown more anxious in life, my procrastinatory tendencies have surged. Knowing that to do something now will serve me well, I put it off all the same. I'm doing it right now with the final edits of 3 essays I have to do for mid-January. Every day I don't work on them is a day of less research and less perfection, and yet I avoid checking my emails and the comments my professors have because of some kind of fear . Fear, really, is the main issue here. Fear really has a hold on me. I fear the most ridiculous things, the smallest things. I fear what people might think, which manifests itself in a thousand little avoidances and procrastinations. Don't get close to people, you'll come across as too needy. Don't post too much online, you'll come across as too attention-seeking, or people will see through th...

Over the past 5 years, I have unravelled as a person somewhat. Going into my first year of university, I recall being enthused, passionate, loving, and ambitious. I wanted to develop intellectually and personally; I wanted to build friendships and desperately find love; I wanted to perfect myself in the art of living -- perfect my intellect, perfect my sociability. Of course every 18 year old is an idealist if they haven't been truly broken yet. Up to that point, I had had terrible things happen to me from a personal point of view -- I had been moved around the world a couple of times, which meant being torn from friends in a heartbreaking way; I had witnessed the destruction of my mom and step father's marriage; I had loved deeply and unreciprocally. All these things cast wounds that turned to scars, but there is such thing as youthful perseverance, and I broke through it. I think these tough times planted the seeds of anxiety and depression in me, ready to blossom at a lat...

Self-efficacy is a concept in behavioural psychology that basically describes one's belief in oneself. Yeah, it sounds lame and clichéd, but this is something that people have attempted to scientifically study and have patterns and explanations about. Basically, high self-efficacy means you have a "can-do" spirit; low self-efficacy means you doubt your ability to achieve your goals. I've fluctuated in levels of self-efficacy throughout my life. As a child, I believe I've had extremely high levels of self-efficacy: I can and will be an author, I can and will get into x university, I can and will be one of the smartest in my class, etc. etc. One of the key features of self-efficacy is that having it affects outcomes . In other words, psychology has shown: if you believe you can do it, you have a higher chance of successfully doing it. Isn't that crazy? One aspect of success is literally self-fulfilling your own prophesies. Over the past few years, I've h...

One way to figure out how to improve your levels of happiness is to figure out what circumstances make you sad and to minimise them. This might be more effective than merely trying to figure out what makes you happy and doing that, simply because it's easier to get sad than it is to get happy, so blocking sadness out at the root provides you with a kind of safety net, so to speak, upon which you can build your happiness. In other words, if you're trying to build your happiness on rotten foundations (having not yet removed and cemented over the possible sources of sadness), your happiness is likely to crumble more frequently. Now, sadness, like almost everything, has a structure by which it operates. It's not impossible that all the things that make you sad make you sad individually, with no connection to each other, but typically there is a shared feature amongst them that makes you sad. Instead of analysing every single thing one-by-one, it's going to be more useful ...

I'm a naturally anxious person. I vacillate between thinking I perhaps do have a mild disorder I should see somebody about and thinking it's just a fall-out from my way of thinking and my personality. Of course those two things aren't mutually exclusive, but if I think of it more in terms of the latter than the former, it makes me feel as though I have more agency over it. Lately (and for the past, like, 8-10 years of my life, but particularly lately) I have contemplated just that -- what ways can tinker with my way of thinking that might get me to be less anxious. I've come up with something that I want to try to internalise. If I don't reflect too heavily on the possible results of an event, my natural disposition is to expect that the worst case scenario will be horrifying and to avoid putting myself in that position. That's called being risk-averse, and I don't remember ever actively deciding to be that kind of person, but it just happened at some poin...

So, it's over. About a week ago, I came out of my final undergraduate exam. It was a difficult exam that I was massively underprepared for, but I hope I did not do so badly as to require a resit, or as to have pulled my average down from the aim of a 2:1 to a 2:2. If that does happen, I'm aware that I kind of deserve it. I lost my spirit with regard to revising for Italian, so I basically didn't. Let's just hope to god things go okay re other grades. Well that was a depressing opening. I wanted this to be a retrospective about my time at uni and then a prospective about my future, but now I'm already a bit down from thinking about those exams. Dang. No worries, onwards with the show. I think what I'll do with this post is break down my time at uni as I remember it, year by year, reflecting on how I've grown. Then I'll consider the future briefly (tho I seem to do that often on this blog anyway). Here goes. Pre-Uni What bright and hopeful days -- on...

I want to be successful. I've always wanted to be successful. I'm particularly drawn to the tales of people who have made something of their lives, who have directed their energy towards something and proved themselves to the world in some way or another. None of this is particularly unusual. I think it's a fairly normal human emotion to have ambition and be drawn to those who have acted on and achieved something with their ambitions. However, desiring success is dangerously close to desiring fame , and these days that latter thing is a dirty thing to desire. There is a difference between the two. Having success does not entail having fame -- this much is obvious. You can be a successful employee at a company and have nobody but your co-workers and industry peers know your name (perhaps not even them, to be honest). You can be a housewife and raise wonderful children, and be known to nobody outside of your community and family -- this is a kind of success. So, success mea...

Whenever you show yourself to be inclined towards self-improvement, there tends to be some well-meaning person who demands of you, "Why wait? Just do it now. Just do it now." They mean to tell you that each passing day brings you closer to death, so if something is wrong with your life and you want to change it, you are losing precious time by not doing it right now rather than tomorrow, or next week, or as a new year's resolution. But these people over-simplify a certain psychological aspect of motivation. To be motivated to do something, you often need more than just a belief that something is the right thing to do -- you often need some supporting prop: be that an incentive or some externally-imposed structure. Whatever it is, something more than just the belief in what you ought to do is needed to help people along. This is the beauty in New Year's for me. Of course it is arbitrary, of course when the day this year goes from December 31, 2015 to January 1, 2016...

My self-loathing recently has reached an incredible high, which tells me I need sit down and reconfigure my thoughts. University is not going well. My organisation is poor and my motivation is at a near-unprecedented low. I read somewhere that if you're prone to self-loathing, you need to isolate your self-loathing triggers and understand them, then hopefully deal with them. My largest self-loathing trigger is the failure to get things done or failing to attend a class, things which stem from my organisational failures. The reason I've been having organisation failures recently is that my system is built presently on a foundation of feeling rather than structure. My system's instructions read "do x when you feel like it" rather than "do x at time t". As a result, I've been failing to attend classes and do work, especially related to the Italian side of my degree, because I've fallen entirely and fully out of love with it. I also end up sleeping...

Well, I haven't written here in a long time. Since I last wrote, I finally escaped my exile, thus completing my year abroad, returned to the UK, and began my fourth and final year of university. I don't really know what this post is supposed to be about in particular, but I know I need to get in touch with my internal life again. I've found that I've been losing more and more control of how I feel over time, and perhaps it has to do with the fact that I no longer have an outlet to order my emotions like I used to. I don't know. Anyway, since then I've started my fourth year and have been in a stable relationship for a few months. I guess part of what I want to talk about is how fourth year is going and how that relationship is going. This particular semester is overwhelming me. I have the majority of my courses concentrated in this semester and the workload has been burdensome. I've skipped days on multiple occasions, which is something I would prefer ...

To some extent, everybody has an aesthetic duty to themselves. This is something I'm coming to learn, but it's taking a very long time to fully accept. I view aesthetic and ethics as siblings -- perhaps even twins -- they are almost identical, except the one deals with questions we allot a greater sense of triviality (beauty, image) and the other we take more seriously (how to treat others, how to comport yourself). However, in terms of their argumentative structures, my hunch is that they are identical. Ethics has been important to me for quite a long time now -- I've long been searching for how to live the good life -- but I see now that I can't ignore aesthetics either, as the more "trivial" elements also play quite important roles in what we call "the good life". There are three examples that have been on my mind recently. The first is the aesthetics of your environment -- the places you spend the most time in, like your room. Historically I ha...

I know what the next major hurdle in the development of myself is, and that's emotional risk. Emotional risk isn't so complicated a subject and I'm sure it affects everybody to some degree or another. All I mean by it is the potential emotional pain you may cause yourself by committing yourself to any personal endeavour. For me my problem is largely to do with interpersonal relationships, so I'll be talking about that, though 'personal endeavour' could refer to anything really. I've come to realise that my entire life has unfurled in such a way that it has made me feel as though emotional risk ought be avoided at all costs. I can trace this progression. Firstly--and this is me much younger, so I don't have active memories of this; rather it's speculation--I was born in Botswana and moved to England at a very young age. In this period of development, I'm willing to speculate that subconsciously my lessons first began in avoiding attachments too ...