Lie To Impress & Get It All Wrong

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About 10 years ago, I was in the middle of suffering a massive depression; my self-esteem had virtually hit rock bottom and my self-confidence was nearly un-existent.

Of course everyone was always telling me where I needed to "improve"( *note: I actually didn't need to), and why no matter what I did was never good enough, but.......

of course I'd feel hopeless after no matter what I did, it wasn't enough. So, people would tell me my positive qualities.

Uh oh...wait a minute: those aren't my positive qualities! The traits in me they mentioned were either common everyday things, or totally non-existent.

One I can remember offhand was being told--in regards to finding a gal-- "you're charming".

Ok...I can tell you, my Dad can tell you, and even my girlfriend backed it up: "Russell, you have many, many positive traits; charming is not one of them."

Then they'd tell me stuff like "well, you're good with a computer!" First of all, I'm only about as good as the average user; I'm no expert on it. Sure, I'm smarter than a certain quantity of senior citizens with it, but in my mind that didn't mean dick; why should it?

What it came down to was....people kept trying to build me up after telling me where I was failing or whatnot....and they couldn't even properly do that!

It also may explain why my depression lasted so much longer than it otherwise may have.

Yes, I'm long out of it, and a lot of it I worked to get myself out of by reading a lot of inspirational stuff....and finding out I was Autistic helped more than you could imagine.

Anyone else go thru this?

My grandma just can't seem to stop telling me how impressive my social skills are and how great I am at math.

Nothing's ever good enough for society. Everything has to be perfect.

I dramatically reduced the social contact I have with people who don't really accept me for who I am, even though my differences are harmless to them. In fact, I completely cut some of them out of my life! They are shallow, and they're not worth my time.

And yes, there have been times when people praised me about things that weren't true, I found it patronizing and embarrassing.

the funniest thing is one of the people who told me this I'm no longer friends with; she compromised our friendship to date a guy I couldn't stand.

Looking back, and knowing what I know, I'm not even bothered by it. For some reason she's attracted to losers, and actually had a mindset of "well, I always had to take care of my brothers and sisters when I was younger, in the process never really having one myself...so I'm gonna enjoy childhood now!"

Y-yeah.........



I actually decided to write down my positive traits at work, and the interesting thing I noticed about most of them is that either it didn't shine at the time I was told about them the way they do now, or I kept getting disrupted from putting them into action.

A few made sense even then, but I kept thinking at that time "yeah, but I'm sure most other folks are like this to, or they can do it better"

I've come to realize no they aren't...but it's also why I've only a few years ago found my soulmate, and why everyone else has had a "better" dating life than I have; I mean....most of those traits probably seem too good to be true, so either people were scared off( my being different probably "didn't help" with that), intimidated, or didn't even want to bother making the attempt.

The plus side is I regret nothing of it; why would I have wanted to waste my time with them, anyway? ':B-)