My very first psychologist said many years ago, “The people who come to me and say, ‘I have low self-esteem, I’m shy and self-conscious’ have no idea that they actually have a much better self-esteem* than anybody else. It’s those who have no idea that their self-esteem is in the toilet who are very hard to help. They bustle through life without even beginning to realize that all the noise they make is motivated by huge self-esteem issues. You think it’s the quiet kid reading alone in the corner who has the greatest psychological problems? You couldn’t be more mistaken. The loud kid who is the center of attention and seems the most confident is in so much pain inside that the quiet kid cannot even begin to imagine what the loud one is going through.”
This is why I always prefer shy, quiet people. They are the healthiest ones psychologically.
* Can we avoid doing yet another rounds of comments on how the word self-esteem is traumatizing people because American media something-something? This conversation didn’t take place in the US.
Clarissa's Blog 
How one evaluates oneself against others surely makes no sense in any ultimate analysis, since there will always be people who are better than you, or worse, at anything. I wonder if “self esteem” would remain in the language if people could simply realize that they have a right to enjoy doing whatever it is they do.
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Some people can easily hate themselves on a deserted island. 🙂
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I can hate myself sometimes, but it is extremely rare for me to do so and I tend to see it as a passing storm. For instance, I hated myself when I was overtired and preparing for my martial arts exam. I began to think, “Who is this ape going for her martial arts exam!”
Most of the time I am too amused at some new aspect of my experience to hate myself. My inner life is very, very vivid. For instance, lately I have had a dream twice that a hotel I was staying in has been destroyed whilst I still had a room booked permanently there. I think this has to do with my final rejection of postmodernist theorizing and my realizing that I had invested so much of my subjectivity in that. It feels very weird. The new hotel is more complex, but not for me, and I don’t mind leaving it.
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