Gentle Suggestions

This is not an advice column

I’ve always had low self-esteem but struggled with raising it, and then I learnt that super-high self-esteem is related to narcissism, prejudice, and potential violence towards perceived ego threats. How can I instead raise my self-respect and self-compassion? Basically, how can I be more confident without being a dick?

I thought about your question for a few days and was going to write you a long thing about how a good place to explore these feelings is actually in therapy but therapy is expensive and takes a long time. That sucks because in therapy, they will definitely tell you if you are a narcissist or not. You can just ask for a diagnosis. My friend Chloë told me that and my therapist hasn’t known peace since. I’ve done enough therapy for both of us so you should know that there are actually two different types of narcissists: “grandiose”ones who have a genuinely overinflated sense of self and “vulnerable” ones who have low self-esteem and crave affirmation. Vulnerable narcissists are huge dicks too.

I was going to tell you that you should absolutely not worry about super-high self-esteem because you are not at risk for that delusion but you are maybe at risk for being dickish about your low self-esteem and you should probably just focus on the normal, healthy amount of self-esteem but what does that even mean? Then I took a heroic dose of mushrooms and disintegrated bit by bit before completely dying to myself. It was a very intense experience but when I tapped back into this realm, I was still thinking about you and how I had focused on the wrong part of your question. I want to do that less until I don’t do it at all.