I swear, if one more person tells me I have low self esteem, I am going to thump them.
Maybe I do have low self esteem. But that’s not how I see it. I see low self esteem as a self-loathing, a hatred of what you are and how you look. That no-one will ever love you, and that nothing you ever do is ever worthwhile, or will ever result in being your being happy. I should know, I’ve been there.
But I quite like myself now. I’m proud of what I do. I see a future for me, and I see someone loving me. I accept that no-one I meet will ever be perfect, and I accept that I am not perfect myself. I can deal with what life throws at me most of the time.
My problem is twofold. Firstly, because I spent so many years hating myself, it’s my go-to place when I’m depressed, tired or low. You can spend all the time you like sorting out your thought patterns, but it’s a whole lot harder to stick to them when you haven’t any energy. Consequently, when I burst into tears because “I’m stressed out and I can’t cope“, people assume that what I’m really saying is that I CAN’T cope - and thus that I feel I’m hopeless, can’t achieve my goals etc. rather than making me a cup of tea, giving me a hug and just saying ‘there there’. That’s all I want, people! Stop making assumptions about my behaviour!
The second problem is this: I have ridiculously high standards, and expect everyone to live by them. They’ve been handed down the generations and I can’t seem to shed the damn things. Thus I spend a large portion of my life feeling I’m letting people down because I can’t do everything I want for them - and feeling sad that other people don’t do those things for me. Bizarrely, when someone does do something nice I then get so emotional and overwhelmed by the gesture that I burst into tears and can rarely remember many details of the event afterwards.
The reason this is such a problem is that in my mind this extends to God. No-one has ever cut me slack for not doing my best, so why should he? Why, when love has always been so heavily associated with success, would God love me if I failed him, or any one of his children?
I can accept that Jesus forgives far worse things than I've ever done, but I just can't quite believe that the same forgiveness extends to me. I just can't accept that I deserve to go to heaven. That God loves me.
I had something of a theological debate with Jon the other day (flaming row might be more appropriate), and in the course of it I actually said that I truly believe I'm a horrible person, who doesn't deserve to go to heaven. And you know what? I do think that. He looked at me like I’d gone stark raving bonkers, which in all truth might be a fair judgement. Where have I got this absurd idea from? Where in my life have I assimilated the conception that it’s one rule for all of humanity, and another for me?
Now I wasn’t raised a Catholic, but I did attend a C of E primary school - and my town’s Parish Church (the sort you attended each week not because you wanted to spend time with God per se, but because if you didn’t go, you would lose brownie points in the congregation) which may bring with it its own brand of childhood trauma. Could it be that my early experience with church was so far removed from any experience of being loved by God that I still find the idea of God wanting me as part of his family rather than part of a congregation all vying for alpha status, quite simply alien? I certainly think it plays a part.
TBC…
Thursday, 28 January 2010
Sunday, 17 January 2010
I just don't have the time!
From my UCB daily jigger...
Our days are like identical suitcases, but some people pack more into them
than others. That's because they know what to pack. Everybody gets
twenty-four hours, but not everybody gets the same return on them.
The truth is, you don't manage your time, you manage your life. Time cannot be
controlled; it marches on no matter what you do. Nobody, no matter how
shrewd, can save minutes from one day to spend in another. No scientist is
capable of creating new minutes. With all his wealth, Warren Buffett can't
buy additional hours for his day. People talk about trying to 'find time,'
but they need to quit looking; there isn't any extra lying around.
Twenty-four hours is the best any of us is going to get. Wise people
understand that time is their most precious commodity. As a result, they
know where their time goes. They continually analyse how they are using
their time and ask themselves, 'Am I getting the best use out of my time?'
In his book What To Do Between Birth and Death: The Art of Growing Up,
Charles Spezzano writes: 'You don't really pay for things with money, you
pay for them with time. We say, "In five years, I'll have enough money put
away for that vacation house we want. Then I'll slow down." That means the
house will cost you five years; one-twelfth of your adult life. Translate
the pound value of the house, car, or anything else into time, and then see
if it's still worth it.'
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Port, earrings and ugliness
I was thinking this morning about an old adage that sounds so cliche now, but it so very true, and it has to do with my earrings. You see, I got them from Santa at Christmas (how old am I now...?) but they're originally made by the Tuareg (I think that's spelled right) who are a nomadic tribe in north Africa (makes mental note to Wiki this presently).
At first sight, they're lovely, silver and some sort of stone, but when you look at the fixings, they're all blackened and icky looking. I didn't want to wear them at first for fear of my ears going black, or reacting to something and swelling up. But I've been wearing them the past week, and no problems at all. Much better than some of my other earrings...
The other example was that of a bottle of port that a friends' mum was given. It was dusty and covered in crap, but they said "drink it, it's amazing!". Needless to say said recipient put it away for a while and tried to forget about it. But the friend persisted with asking them if they'd tried it yet, and after a while she did. And the word she used to describe it was nectar. She'd never tried anything like it, and certainly never expected it out of such a manky looking bottle.
The adage is of course "don't judge a book by its cover" - but thinking of it on a deeper level, I realised I need to remember that sometimes the very best things do come out of the least attractive places.
Sometimes you need to reach your very lowest point to turn things around. Sometimes you have to confront the really unattractive parts of yourself to access new places and build new roads. And sometimes what you think are the ugliest parts of yourself are exactly what makes you so sweet :o)
At first sight, they're lovely, silver and some sort of stone, but when you look at the fixings, they're all blackened and icky looking. I didn't want to wear them at first for fear of my ears going black, or reacting to something and swelling up. But I've been wearing them the past week, and no problems at all. Much better than some of my other earrings...
The other example was that of a bottle of port that a friends' mum was given. It was dusty and covered in crap, but they said "drink it, it's amazing!". Needless to say said recipient put it away for a while and tried to forget about it. But the friend persisted with asking them if they'd tried it yet, and after a while she did. And the word she used to describe it was nectar. She'd never tried anything like it, and certainly never expected it out of such a manky looking bottle.
The adage is of course "don't judge a book by its cover" - but thinking of it on a deeper level, I realised I need to remember that sometimes the very best things do come out of the least attractive places.
Sometimes you need to reach your very lowest point to turn things around. Sometimes you have to confront the really unattractive parts of yourself to access new places and build new roads. And sometimes what you think are the ugliest parts of yourself are exactly what makes you so sweet :o)
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Sex and Marriage
Why not start out with something utterly controversial?
Sex before marriage is a topic that has caused me so much angst, because it goes totally against what I would consider normal behaviour. We’re human, right? We’re designed to reproduce! But then I’m a biologist so I would say something like that.
You see, the normal reasons given for abstaining centre around unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, and quite frankly those things don’t happen if you’re careful. But another reason that gets trotted out is the effect on self esteem and the resulting "hurt". Personally I feel that sex doesn’t cause low self esteem, it’s just often what people do when they have low self esteem - to make themselves feel better. So what about "hurt"?
Ok, yes, I have certainly been hurt as a result of relationships that contained sex. But would that have been different if there had been no sex? And what other things have hurt me? What are the things that make me uncomfortable when I find that a new boyfriend has had sexual experiences with previous girlfriends?
I’m in a fortunate position in some ways as my university boyfriend, at the ripe old age of 21 had yet to have even kissed a girl - let alone had a girlfriend, so the issue of sex didn’t come into it. And how did that work out? I ended up feeling that he couldn’t appreciate me as he had nothing to compare me to - how could he know then what he had in me? How lucky he was? For me, an inexperienced boyfriend is not going to save me from other problems.
Thinking back, the first boyfriend I really had sex with properly (although not my first encounter) was a virgin - and it was me who badgered him into sex. I however spent the entirety of our relationship feeling inferior to one of his ex girlfriends whom I knew from college - she was in the year above and I considered she was way cooler than me. That same icky feeling I get now was there - though it had nothing to do with sex, as they hadn't been there.
No - the icky feeling came from the same old questions that go around my head now: was she prettier than me? Was she sexier than me? What things did you like about her that I don’t have? Did you have a better time with her than with me? Did you feel differently about her than you do about me? Did you (and here’s the big one) love her more than me?
In my eyes, it’s love that hurts people - not sex. Yes, I have been hurt by infidelity, and by sordid icky stuff that has involved dabbling in things connected to sex (for example, my dad looking at porn, my boyfriend having instant-messenger sex with his ex girlfriend) but the thing that really hurt me there was the betrayal of my love. That someone I loved would lie to me, would take my love and effectively toss it to one side like a piece of junk mail without even looking at it. That my love to them was less important to them than their own interests. Granted these two examples might have been easier to deal with had sex not been connected, but any betrayal of love would still have hurt.
Take my mum making fun of me when I struggled to cope with my first period (and steadfastly denying it years later), or a close friend blowing my being unable to meet up with her one day into an argument that would end our friendship, or another friend simply ceasing to speak to me for no apparent reason - they all hurt, and those hurts cut that much deeper for the fact that the people concerned weren’t simply boyfriends I’d known for a few months. I loved them and they betrayed that love. That hurts.
So let’s look at my relationship now. I have known Jon for 2 months, we’ve been together for about a month and a half. We haven’t had sex. But we have talked about it a helluva lot. On our first date (for some obscure reason) the subject came up and I mentioned I didn’t want any more sex until I was married, and he, having consumed the best part of two bottles of wine by that point, launched into a tirade about why that’s rubbish. While not the best start to a relationship it did open up the subject early, and we’ve discussed it a lot and decided to wait. And I, in my mind, have thought about it a whole lot more.
To my mind there is nothing conclusive in the Bible that says that sex, in a loving, committed relationship, is wrong. And believe me I've read it every which way. Jesus says that every wife should have a husband, and vice versa (to me saying polygamy - acceptable at the time - is wrong), and Paul goes on about avoiding sexual immorality (pornaeia in Greek - a topic in itself), which, considering the port of Corinth at the time is unsurprising - most of the stuff he discusses I would consider wrong now! But the problem with morality is that it is relative, and changes through time and from person to person. In English society until not so long ago, we accepted that sex before marriage is a sin - but in some African countries a man needs to know his wife can bear him children before he will marry her. Which is right? Which is moral?
I remember the first time I heard the term “sex before marriage” - it was in a letter from a friend, who said he disagreed with it. I must have been about 11, and while fully aware of the mechanics of where babies came from (I had my Usborne books, after all) had utterly no experience of any kind of relationship. I knew I wanted to get married one day, and I knew that to have babies required s-e-x, but I don’t think that at that age I saw the two as mutually interdependent, and the idea struck me as odd for the very simple fact that it was a thing. It seemed to be a topic, when I just saw them as things that people would make their minds up about at some point - not be told by someone else. Surely there wasn’t a person who decided such important things and then told other people about them? How bizarre.
I think in my mind at that age I saw my likely relationship pattern thus: I would meet a nice boy, we would be friends and do our homework together. Maybe one day we would decide to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Then at some point, after having been together for a few years, he would propose. We would be engaged for about 4 years while we travelled the world, and then, eventually, at some point in the distant, grown-up future we would get married, buy a house and settle down.
As life would have it though, I got introduced to the idea of ‘self loathing’ about a year later - that I should not be happy with the person I was - and as this was considered ‘normal’ I did it. I’d never considered hating myself before then. I’d been unhappy, but I never hated myself.
So then I started growing up, and no nice boy materialised. All my friends at some point had boyfriends in some shape or another, some even got really very serious, but no boys were ever interested in me, which to me confirmed that my self loathing was accurate. I was bullied at school because I was clever, and had no friends because I was too socially inept - it seemed conclusive that together with the fact that boys weren’t interested that I was a complete failure as a human being. That in itself has scarred me far more than sex ever has.
So when I hit 16 and sex was the thing to do - I did it! And I was good at it! It made me feel powerful and desirable, and who doesn’t want that? Sadly the hurt here came not from being used, or feeling that I needed to give sex to be loved, but that the sex I had never came from a place of love so much as teenage frustration. What I really wanted was a steady relationship with a boyfriend I’d known for years, who one day would cover my bedroom in roses, swear he’d always love me, and steal our virginity away in a bed of awkward kisses and clumsy familiarity.
What reality gave me was a broken family, years of having my self esteem systematically crushed by bitchy girls at school, and not so much as a passing glance from a boy before I started hanging out in the park drinking cheap vodka. Actually that’s not true - I had two encounters with boys at the Christian youth group I attended, one of whom turned out to have a fiancée back home, and the other of whom went out with me for a week to get another (prettier, dumber) girl to like him. He even told me this, and I was ok with it. Hmmm.
Jon often says that we’re broken people in a broken world, and that is why these things happen - and he’s right. Maybe if my mum wasn’t so insecure herself she could have passed some confidence on to me; maybe if my dad had come from a happy home he wouldn’t have married so young and spent his life regretting it - and cheating on my mum to make up for it. Maybe - if you corrected all the things that our parents have done to make us feel inadequate, insecure or unloved - all the way back to Adam and Eve, we would be able to act in a fashion where we won’t hurt others by what we do - or feel the need to confirm our love for another person with sex, rather than simply believing them when they tell us. But we’re broken people in a broken world, and we hurt from what the world has done to us - so one rule of “no sex before marriage” simply doesn’t take into account the past we are bringing with us to a new relationship. The imperfect love that has damaged us.
Now Jesus, by all accounts, was a pretty nice guy. He loved the world so much that he came into it, broken sinners and all. A sinless man in a horribly corrupt world. But he did it, and while he was here he broke down what we’d today consider obvious barriers like talking to Jews and Gentiles, respecting children, preaching against the worshipping of idols and that we should love our neighbour as our self.
Jesus wants us to love ourselves, and that means respecting our feelings and looking after our bodies. We have so much information available at our fingertips now that making a choice on something like this seems unnecessarily complicated. But what I think God wants us to do is really think about our actions. Spend time working out with him the best way forward.
If we’re deciding to have sex with a new partner we need to think about what we’re doing - really doing, and why we’re doing it. If it’s going to feel wrong a minute, a week, or a month afterwards then we shouldn’t do it. If it’s not what we really want, we shouldn’t do it. If we’re going to feel uneasy or awkward talking to God afterwards, we shouldn’t do it.
God gave us brains and a set of books to guide us, but I think it’s our job to interpret it. It ain’t always easy to make the right choice, but then no-one ever said it would be. Just always remember that God loves you. So much that he gave his only son so that you could be saved. And that is a love that is not broken. That is a love that will not ever hurt.
And this is what I need to remember.
Sex before marriage is a topic that has caused me so much angst, because it goes totally against what I would consider normal behaviour. We’re human, right? We’re designed to reproduce! But then I’m a biologist so I would say something like that.
You see, the normal reasons given for abstaining centre around unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, and quite frankly those things don’t happen if you’re careful. But another reason that gets trotted out is the effect on self esteem and the resulting "hurt". Personally I feel that sex doesn’t cause low self esteem, it’s just often what people do when they have low self esteem - to make themselves feel better. So what about "hurt"?
Ok, yes, I have certainly been hurt as a result of relationships that contained sex. But would that have been different if there had been no sex? And what other things have hurt me? What are the things that make me uncomfortable when I find that a new boyfriend has had sexual experiences with previous girlfriends?
I’m in a fortunate position in some ways as my university boyfriend, at the ripe old age of 21 had yet to have even kissed a girl - let alone had a girlfriend, so the issue of sex didn’t come into it. And how did that work out? I ended up feeling that he couldn’t appreciate me as he had nothing to compare me to - how could he know then what he had in me? How lucky he was? For me, an inexperienced boyfriend is not going to save me from other problems.
Thinking back, the first boyfriend I really had sex with properly (although not my first encounter) was a virgin - and it was me who badgered him into sex. I however spent the entirety of our relationship feeling inferior to one of his ex girlfriends whom I knew from college - she was in the year above and I considered she was way cooler than me. That same icky feeling I get now was there - though it had nothing to do with sex, as they hadn't been there.
No - the icky feeling came from the same old questions that go around my head now: was she prettier than me? Was she sexier than me? What things did you like about her that I don’t have? Did you have a better time with her than with me? Did you feel differently about her than you do about me? Did you (and here’s the big one) love her more than me?
In my eyes, it’s love that hurts people - not sex. Yes, I have been hurt by infidelity, and by sordid icky stuff that has involved dabbling in things connected to sex (for example, my dad looking at porn, my boyfriend having instant-messenger sex with his ex girlfriend) but the thing that really hurt me there was the betrayal of my love. That someone I loved would lie to me, would take my love and effectively toss it to one side like a piece of junk mail without even looking at it. That my love to them was less important to them than their own interests. Granted these two examples might have been easier to deal with had sex not been connected, but any betrayal of love would still have hurt.
Take my mum making fun of me when I struggled to cope with my first period (and steadfastly denying it years later), or a close friend blowing my being unable to meet up with her one day into an argument that would end our friendship, or another friend simply ceasing to speak to me for no apparent reason - they all hurt, and those hurts cut that much deeper for the fact that the people concerned weren’t simply boyfriends I’d known for a few months. I loved them and they betrayed that love. That hurts.
So let’s look at my relationship now. I have known Jon for 2 months, we’ve been together for about a month and a half. We haven’t had sex. But we have talked about it a helluva lot. On our first date (for some obscure reason) the subject came up and I mentioned I didn’t want any more sex until I was married, and he, having consumed the best part of two bottles of wine by that point, launched into a tirade about why that’s rubbish. While not the best start to a relationship it did open up the subject early, and we’ve discussed it a lot and decided to wait. And I, in my mind, have thought about it a whole lot more.
To my mind there is nothing conclusive in the Bible that says that sex, in a loving, committed relationship, is wrong. And believe me I've read it every which way. Jesus says that every wife should have a husband, and vice versa (to me saying polygamy - acceptable at the time - is wrong), and Paul goes on about avoiding sexual immorality (pornaeia in Greek - a topic in itself), which, considering the port of Corinth at the time is unsurprising - most of the stuff he discusses I would consider wrong now! But the problem with morality is that it is relative, and changes through time and from person to person. In English society until not so long ago, we accepted that sex before marriage is a sin - but in some African countries a man needs to know his wife can bear him children before he will marry her. Which is right? Which is moral?
I remember the first time I heard the term “sex before marriage” - it was in a letter from a friend, who said he disagreed with it. I must have been about 11, and while fully aware of the mechanics of where babies came from (I had my Usborne books, after all) had utterly no experience of any kind of relationship. I knew I wanted to get married one day, and I knew that to have babies required s-e-x, but I don’t think that at that age I saw the two as mutually interdependent, and the idea struck me as odd for the very simple fact that it was a thing. It seemed to be a topic, when I just saw them as things that people would make their minds up about at some point - not be told by someone else. Surely there wasn’t a person who decided such important things and then told other people about them? How bizarre.
I think in my mind at that age I saw my likely relationship pattern thus: I would meet a nice boy, we would be friends and do our homework together. Maybe one day we would decide to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Then at some point, after having been together for a few years, he would propose. We would be engaged for about 4 years while we travelled the world, and then, eventually, at some point in the distant, grown-up future we would get married, buy a house and settle down.
As life would have it though, I got introduced to the idea of ‘self loathing’ about a year later - that I should not be happy with the person I was - and as this was considered ‘normal’ I did it. I’d never considered hating myself before then. I’d been unhappy, but I never hated myself.
So then I started growing up, and no nice boy materialised. All my friends at some point had boyfriends in some shape or another, some even got really very serious, but no boys were ever interested in me, which to me confirmed that my self loathing was accurate. I was bullied at school because I was clever, and had no friends because I was too socially inept - it seemed conclusive that together with the fact that boys weren’t interested that I was a complete failure as a human being. That in itself has scarred me far more than sex ever has.
So when I hit 16 and sex was the thing to do - I did it! And I was good at it! It made me feel powerful and desirable, and who doesn’t want that? Sadly the hurt here came not from being used, or feeling that I needed to give sex to be loved, but that the sex I had never came from a place of love so much as teenage frustration. What I really wanted was a steady relationship with a boyfriend I’d known for years, who one day would cover my bedroom in roses, swear he’d always love me, and steal our virginity away in a bed of awkward kisses and clumsy familiarity.
What reality gave me was a broken family, years of having my self esteem systematically crushed by bitchy girls at school, and not so much as a passing glance from a boy before I started hanging out in the park drinking cheap vodka. Actually that’s not true - I had two encounters with boys at the Christian youth group I attended, one of whom turned out to have a fiancée back home, and the other of whom went out with me for a week to get another (prettier, dumber) girl to like him. He even told me this, and I was ok with it. Hmmm.
Jon often says that we’re broken people in a broken world, and that is why these things happen - and he’s right. Maybe if my mum wasn’t so insecure herself she could have passed some confidence on to me; maybe if my dad had come from a happy home he wouldn’t have married so young and spent his life regretting it - and cheating on my mum to make up for it. Maybe - if you corrected all the things that our parents have done to make us feel inadequate, insecure or unloved - all the way back to Adam and Eve, we would be able to act in a fashion where we won’t hurt others by what we do - or feel the need to confirm our love for another person with sex, rather than simply believing them when they tell us. But we’re broken people in a broken world, and we hurt from what the world has done to us - so one rule of “no sex before marriage” simply doesn’t take into account the past we are bringing with us to a new relationship. The imperfect love that has damaged us.
Now Jesus, by all accounts, was a pretty nice guy. He loved the world so much that he came into it, broken sinners and all. A sinless man in a horribly corrupt world. But he did it, and while he was here he broke down what we’d today consider obvious barriers like talking to Jews and Gentiles, respecting children, preaching against the worshipping of idols and that we should love our neighbour as our self.
Jesus wants us to love ourselves, and that means respecting our feelings and looking after our bodies. We have so much information available at our fingertips now that making a choice on something like this seems unnecessarily complicated. But what I think God wants us to do is really think about our actions. Spend time working out with him the best way forward.
If we’re deciding to have sex with a new partner we need to think about what we’re doing - really doing, and why we’re doing it. If it’s going to feel wrong a minute, a week, or a month afterwards then we shouldn’t do it. If it’s not what we really want, we shouldn’t do it. If we’re going to feel uneasy or awkward talking to God afterwards, we shouldn’t do it.
God gave us brains and a set of books to guide us, but I think it’s our job to interpret it. It ain’t always easy to make the right choice, but then no-one ever said it would be. Just always remember that God loves you. So much that he gave his only son so that you could be saved. And that is a love that is not broken. That is a love that will not ever hurt.
And this is what I need to remember.
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