"I have been prejudiced against myself from my earliest childhood: hence I find some truth in all blame and some stupidity in all praise. I generally estimate praise too poorly and blame too highly." -  Friedrich Nietzsche

I received an email from a girlfriend of mine the other day.  It reads:

It was so nice to spend some time with you today.
Some of what you shared with me was so interesting.
It just makes me think that there's so many of us who have the same basic sense (or lack of !) of self, for many different reasons.
It's so hard to recognize it in others though.
It's so easy to think it's just 'me' who has this particular "flaw" or "weakness".
Thank you for sharing.

For as long as I can remember I have carried feelings of not fitting in, not being good enough, and being less than.  I thought I invented them.  I felt alone with them.  It wasn't until I attended my first personal growth retreat that I realized that I was not alone with these feelings.  People shared stories describing feelings that I could totally relate too.  The details of the stories were different, the players varied, but the feeling of not quite measuring up was pervasive.  Possibly for the first time ever, I felt so normal. 

Since that time I have come to accept this part of myself that never feels good enough.  I have read enough books, attended enough workshops and coached enough people to understand that this is part of our conditioning.  I am not defective or wrong or inadequate... just human.  Somewhere along the line, maybe when I was learning to ride my bicycle with no training wheels as a little girl, I was imprinted with this silly idea that because I wasn't perfect and fell off my bike then that meant I was not good enough as a person.  Who knows?  It matters less now where the story comes from, as long as I remember that it is just a story.  And everybody has their own story. 

Here is an excerpt from a book by Ken Wilbur, Grace & Grit; spirituality and healing in the life and death of Treya Wilbur.  This is taken from Treya Wilbur's journal entry as she navigates through her treatment for breast cancer.

"Forgiving myself means accepting myself.  Gulp!  This means giving up an old friend of mine - self criticism.  My scorpion companion.  When I visualize all the things that keep me from feeling right about myself, then, up higher than the rest, as a kind of backdrop to all my other problems, is a figure of a scorpion with its tail arched over its back.  On the verge of stinging itself.  This is my self-criticism, cutting myself down relentlessly, feeling unlovable, the background feeling behind all the other problems, the grievances against myself that keep me from seeing the light and the miracles that can only be seen in that light.  Hmmm.  The big one.  Getting better, but still the big one.  A touch of an acid feeling in my stomach when I think of it.  What the poison I give myself feels like when I swallow it.

"I used to write down nice things people would say about me because I couldn't quite believe someone felt that way about me.  I sometimes seem to have trouble believing that someone could really love me - like there's a gap between my knowing I'm a good person, people really like being around me, I'm intelligent, pretty, etc. - and yet sometimes I don't see why anyone (a man especially) could/would really love me."

If I were to open my journal on any given day I could read something quite similar.  I find comfort in knowing I am not alone.  I hope you do too.  I'll leave you with this invitation, also from Grace and Grit, "to live more fully, less tentatively.  It's also an invitation to be kinder to yourself - to let up on yourself, to just drop the constant companion of self-criticism and unlovability.  I can put it very simply:  live life easier these days."