The stranger in the mirror

I added a thought yesterday after I had already posted, and I've been wrapping my head around it. It's not really some great epiphany...I think it's something I knew, just maybe not put all the pieces together and said it out loud before.

I've said before that I have low self-esteem. I'm not sure that's really true. Back in 'the day', I KNOW it wasn't true. I would argue whether or not I was 'cocky' (I most certainly wasn't), but I did possess a certain confidence. I think I've always known my strengths and weaknesses, and I've always tried to 'under-sell and over-deliver', but deep down, I thought I was a pretty good guy. Not great, but pretty good...attractive enough that someone could be seen in public with me, smart enough to be able to win an occasional trivia contest, athletic enough to play a game of weekend basketball, decent enough that I could meet your folks, a good enough sense of humor that you wouldn't be bored on a car trip with me. Not spectacular, but I had a niche, and it worked. I was confident in who I was. I still wasn't the most outgoing of people, and I wasn't one to just walk up to someone and start a conversation, but I knew what worked, and I knew how to get along.

Funny thing is, I still believe all those things about myself (well, maybe except for the athletic part.) So why the crisis of confidence, then? It's not that I no longer believe those things, it's that I don't believe other people see those things in me anymore. Again, it's the wrong way to see things, I know. Especially when I can be so stubborn about things...I don't really give a shit if you don't like my taste in music, or movies, or books, or the fact that I play video games...I like them, and that's that, I don't care what you think about it. But I want you to like ME. I want society to find in me all those things that I see in me.

That's a losing battle if there ever was one. Society doesn't really care about me. That was fine up until a few years ago, because I had SOMEONE who did. Someone who saw all those things in me, and did like me. I had someone who, when I thought about what THEY thought of me, I knew they saw all the good in me that I thought was there. Obviously, I lost that. I lost the reflection of myself that let me know that everything was okay with me. I'm trying to find it in myself, and I find it difficult to see sometimes.

I see it occasionally, though, in my son. He's still at that age where he thinks I can fix anything, that I'm someone he can look up to. But he's getting closer to that point where he'll realize that I'm not perfect, that I make mistakes. That maybe I'm not the role model he wants for his life. We all go through that phase. Some of us, like me, come back around and realize that, failings or not, our father or mother IS someone who we can still pattern ourselves after. Maybe he will, maybe he won't. Regardless, I have to be able to look in the mirror and see what I know is there...and some days, I don't. The person I see is sometimes a stranger that looks vaguely familiar, like a much older, sadder version of someone I used to know. And I miss that guy.