ryansutter.net

It’s about me. And it’s about my relationship to you, whoever you are, and it’s about what is happening here, on this blog, and out there, in our lives.

I read a quote yesterday that said something to the effect of “low self-esteem, also known as ambition” and it caused me to sit and stare at the page for a couple of minutes. I’ve always been an ambitious person and I’ve never considered myself to be somebody with low self-esteem. And yet, there was something in that sentence that hit me like a ton of bricks. What is ambition if not the desire to impress upon the people around you that you’re worth a damn? Recently it has become to be clear to me that a lot of my problems in my life, historically, have stemmed from a low opinion of myself, or, more accurately, a firmly held belief that others have a low opinion of me.

I’ve never felt I was worthless, uninteresting, or any of that, but I have long had the feeling that others felt that way about me. This, my wife is fond of reminding me, is completely false. People genuinely care about me, some respect me, some even look up to me, and I know this intellectually, but on some emotional level I still feel like the kid who gets picked last for the team, the guy that people tolerate more than they accept and I have felt that way for nearly my entire life.

Among my early childhood memories is a time when my brother Reed as a toddler was upset over not being allowed to join in to an activity the “big kids” were partaking in. I asked my mom why Reed was crying and she said it was because he felt “left out” of what was going on. A day or two later I was playing in my room and suddenly became aware of the fact that nobody else was in there with me. I went out to see where everybody was and found the whole family, mom, dad, Rhett and Reed, in the living room. They weren’t doing anything in particular, but I started sobbing uncontrollably. My mom asked me what was wrong and I said, “I feel left out”.

When I told this to my therapist I said, “I have no idea why I suddenly started crying then” and he said, “it’s because it’s how you already felt and your mom just gave you a name for it”. And he was right. He was absolutely right.

Now, I’m not writing this because I want to gain any sympathy or to have a pity party for myself. The goal is quite different. I want to acknowledge this situation, this emotional state, this component of my life, and look at where it’s gotten me and how I can approach things differently.

I’m aware that I cannot simply re-write my childhood. I can’t erase the fact that I always felt like an outcast in my own family, like the black sheep. I can’t erase the fact that I currently am an outcast, making a reality what I’ve always felt. I can’t erase being picked on and laughed at and made fun of in middle school for being a “nerd” (a word that used to be intensely painful for me) and I can’t change the fact that I went from being a little kid who was so emotionally sensitive that he cried his eyes out for days after watching “Puff the Magic Dragon” to being a teenager who was often compared to a Vulcan for being so dispassionate and logical.

What I can do is be realistic about it. See how it shapes my actions in my life today. See how those feelings shape my reactions to situations. What does that look like?

God this is hard to write about. I have started this paragraph a dozen times and erased them all. What does that look like? One of the difficulties here is figuring out how to write about this topic without it either seeming as if I’m whining or seeming as if I’m being ridiculously hard on myself.

OK. So, I think maybe a good way to approach this is to talk about something that happened recently, my on-again-off-again upcoming musical performance at the Terminal Bar. I love playing live music. It is one of the most enjoyable things I ever do. To be on-stage singing is just a rush not unlike going on a roller coaster or having sex. It’s thrilling, although I’m the first person to admit that I don’t know exactly why. I just know I like the thrill of it. So, why is it that I so rarely perform? That gets into this whole disconnection thing. You see, music is something that I’ve always had, something that has always been a part of my life and the one area in which I have never had to fight for acceptance. I played with Rhett and he always loved and accepted what I did, always contributed to it himself and made it his own. I was never afraid to share my music with him, never worried that he would be disinterested or that he wouldn’t like it. When I lost that connection, that partner, I started casting around for other musicians to share my love of music with and I found that for the most part they were not easily found. Despite myself, despite knowing that this was how it would be until enough time and circumstance had passed that I would be able to meet new people, I was disheartened and the part of me that felt like an outcast, like a reject, piped up to tell me that the reason I wasn’t finding new people to play with was that people just weren’t interested in me. They just didn’t like me or they didn’t have the same interests, or whatever.

So I’d sit there, well aware that I needed patience and persistence and time to get involved here in this new world while having to battle this internal voice telling me, “people think you’re just a nerd, people just aren’t interested because they can’t see the real you, they’re not worth it, you should just give up the effort and go it alone”. That is how it usually winds up. I work for something, I put myself out there, then when I don’t get the immediate reaction of acceptance that I’m looking for, the reaction I used to get from Rhett, I find myself wanting to cut my losses and get out of Dodge. I decide, far too quickly, that people aren’t worth risking the crappy feeling I get. I agreed to play this gig, I wanted to play it, and I tried to string together a band to play it but I was trying too hard. It didn’t just happen naturally, I was forcing it. When things didn’t work, I took it personally, felt that I couldn’t rely on other people, that I should just go it alone. It’s a common pattern in my life.

It’s also one I have to learn to change. I must. My wife was kind enough to point out to me that my hypersensitivity to not feeling “included” leads me to cut other people off, to do precisely what I am always so afraid of people doing to me. If I don’t get the immediate love and acceptance I am looking for from people then I reject whatever they are offering instead of taking the time to adjust and follow things. If I want people to care about my life, I need to get involved in their lives. This is so painfully obvious that it’s hard to believe it had to be pointed out to me, but I learned to form social connections in a closed system, a world in which everybody you met was already your “brother” or “sister”. My parents didn’t really ever treat me with the love and acceptance I needed, so I got it from my brother and from within the congregation, places where I could take it for granted, where I didn’t have to work much or give much of myself. Those old rules, however, don’t apply any more. My brother is dead and my religion is too. I have to adapt if I ever want to truly connect with the new people in my life. And I can’t make that adaptation until I can understand why I cut people off, why I keep myself aloof and why I respond in such a hypersensitive manner when they fail to read my mind.