I was asked a question on some app called Kiwi. The app is something from twitter where you can randomly ask and answer random questions. Well the question was “What do you see when you look in the mirror?”, and at first I was going to make a smartass remark as an answer, but I decided to think about it for a little bit.

What I see when I look in the mirror is not an easy answer for me. 1) I don’t look in the mirror for more than a minute a day, 2) I rarely look myself in the eyes. I understand the question is more than that. It’s actually a good question. I remembered at some point a few years ago, as an exercise a therapist asked me to write down a list of positive qualities about myself. I actually ran to everyone I knew to tell me something nice about myself, and that is how I came up with my list.

I didn’t even know how low my self esteem was that I couldn’t come up with my own list! It seemed like a simple exercise, a list with no minimum of qualities, just something to put on the paper. I realized I needed to understand myself better, trust myself, get to know who I am, and learn to love who I am good or bad.

There was a time in my life when I never even looked at who I was. I had very low self esteem and depended on others to tell me who I was. Girlfriends, acquaintances, hell a bartender would suffice. It took me a long time to understand why their opinions of me didn’t matter. I learned that they will never know me like I have the “Ability” to know myself. Their influence in my life is fleeting, however I will always have to deal with myself and the consequences of my actions a decisions. I didn’t know how to stand alone, who I was when nobody else was around, and I didn’t know the simple joy of making my own decisions to the benefit (or detriment) of myself.

A list was all it took for me to know how much I didn’t know myself. It was a frightening fact for a 30-something year old to discover they didn’t see the simplest of words to describe oneself in a positive light. It was the beginning of some hard therapy of learning who I was. For me at first it felt like finding a needle in a haystack for each positive word. The list took a year to get to 10 words! (10 words, 10 needles, 10 haystacks!!!) but the worst part of it was all the time it wasn’t just the words I was finding, it was trusting that I believed the description behind each one! So as an example: Smart. I had to search myself for proof that I AM smart. I had to figure out ways through “homework” from the therapist to identify when I do something that “I” considered smart, and being that I didn’t want to make it easy like say “plan a monthly budget that works for me” I had to do something like “learn a new skill” to satisfy my definition of me feeling smart. I was very hard on myself. I wouldn’t set realistic goals, because if it was too hard I wasn’t smart and I didn’t have to believe that I was. I fought harder to keep things off the list than I did to prove things to myself. I AM stubborn. My therapist would identify I was sabotaging myself, I assume because the mood/state of mind you are in has a vast amount of influence over the success of reaching your goals. I didn’t want the words on a list to be easy, I didn’t want to know myself out of fear of what I would find. I just don’t think I liked myself, and I didn’t want to be proven wrong by a piece of paper; but I was. I found the words, then more words, and more.

I am 40 years old, and one thing I do every day on the day of, or after my birthday is I sit down and I make a list of words, positive words that describe who I am. I don’t add to the list from the year before but I write a new one. One word for every year of my life, in no particular order, not trying to remember specifically used words from the year before. It’s my version of “Birthday Punches” where I punch myself with the positive words that for 30-something years I couldn’t find, or even imagine existed if I looked in a mirror.