Happiness is a treasure that is kept in 1 chest under five padlocks:
🔒The one of love.
🔒The one of wisdom.
🔒The one of peace.
🔒The one of abundance.
🔒And the one of freedom.
Fortunately, all of them open with the same key
🗝️ The key to self-esteem.
However, we constantly f*ck up our self-esteem. And many times, we don’t even realize it.
Today, I will share the three habits that cost me all my self-esteem.
I hope they will help you to modify your bad habits and that you will recover the magic key that will open the five locks of your happiness.
1. The habit of engaging in platonic relationships
We live in a world where relationships are increasingly fragile.
Zygmunt Bauman says that we tend to liquid love, a fickle and fragile type of love, the fruit of postmodernity and social networks. It is a type of disposable bond like fast fashion.
When something doesn’t work, we don’t fix it; we throw it away and go for another partner or another friend.
In such a dystopian environment, socially speaking, where everything in itself is easily disposable, the worst thing you can do to yourself is to look for a long-distance relationship over the internet that is only based on virtual love.
I know because it becomes entrenched, and if there is no commitment to see each other face to face and everything remains on the virtual plane, one of the parties in that relationship will end up hurting their self-esteem.
Online platonic love has taken gaslighting to another level.
But there’s something worse than a long-distance platonic love that never materializes: Catfishing.
Catfishing is the act of creating a fake profile on social networks and using it to establish a virtual relationship with someone.
It’s happened to me, and it dries your self-esteem.
Meeting someone who claims to be who they are not, making up a profile full of lies and fake pictures, fills your life with pain and misery.
If you fall for that, your self-esteem jumps off the balcony.
What to do:
Avoid romantic virtual relationships that do not have deadlines.
If you fall in love with someone online, you must commit to meeting on a specific date. If there is no such commitment, one party cheats on the other.
And you don’t want to discover after years of a relationship that your internet boyfriend or girlfriend was not who he or she claimed to be and is married with children.
Very important: photos are not enough, ask for video calls.
2. The habit of making yourself responsible for others’ happiness.
Feeling responsible for other people’s happiness leads you to guilt and, from there, co-dependence.
Nobody tells you that helping others generates dependence. And often, the dependent person will make you feel bad because they are afraid to lose your help.
They throw things in your face so that you seek their approval every day.
And that behavior feeds a toxic relationship between both parts: the helper and the helped
For example, I help my mom. She can’t move properly. In the beginning, my mother made me feel bad for being happy while she was suffering pain.
And it worked; I felt terrible.
But in the past years, I have realized that if I don’t feel fine, I can’t take care of her.
So, Why feel guilty if I’m the one who has to help her?
It’s hard, but if I can’t make her smile one day, I finish helping her with the house chores and go on to do my life. So I turn off my guilt and continue my day in an optimistic mode.
That makes me a monster?
I used to think so; my self-esteem was at rock bottom. But not anymore.
I realize that if I am not positive, I can’t help. So my job is to be optimistic and robust and support my mom.
What to do:
If you are living a similar situation with your loved ones, try to smile and never feel bad about it because the better you feel, the better you help.
Don’t feel bad about feeling good.
3. The habit of believing that everyone is like you
When we get indignant about something that has been done to us, what happens is that we think it is unjust.
And we hold our hands over our heads because we can’t believe that this or that person would do something similar to us.
And the problem is that we take for granted that people have the same education and value system as we do.
And let me tell you something, it’s not 1990 anymore.
Now there’s the internet, and we didn’t all grow up watching the same movies and studying the same things.
We are becoming more and more different from each other.
There’s no good or bad anymore. There is no homogeneous moral code for everyone.
I go by the golden rule and the silver rule.
- Golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated.
- Silver rule: don’t treat others like you wouldn’t want to be treated.
But still, there is the problem of idiots.
The problem with idiots is that they think they are the f*cking masters.
And this is wildly f*cked up because there are more and more idiots, and among them, they form a little group, and they can make you think that the one who has something wrong is you.
A group of idiots can quickly distort your reality and leave you without self-esteem.
It happens in jobs, it happens in families, and it happens in schools.
Bullying is everywhere.
What to do:
You have to strengthen your character and not let yourself be manipulated by the opinions of others. Your self-esteem depends on it.
Don’t get indignant when you feel someone is mistreating you. Instead, save that energy to change the situation. No matter how much you ask yourself why you have been poorly treated, there is no answer because they are not like you. They think differently.
Save yourself headaches and look for solutions rather than reasons.
A virtual hug
AG