My Personal Cheerleader

 

Part 26 of 30

My Fragile Self-Esteem

With the strong emblem of self-esteem on my side (yesterday) and my self-esteem growing at a rapid pace, I want to consolidate my gains. Because if you haven’t got self-esteem, it’s hard to get. And once you get it you know the difference; you don’t want to lose it immediately. Any and all encouragement -- mostly of an inner origin -- is welcome and also does you an amazing amount of good.

You can consider your own best cheerleader! That’s certainly what I think anyway, the way it works. No one else knows your depths or heights. You alone know it, and need to get in there and stoke the fires, hold the fort, open things or keep things on lock-down, it all depends. Having some internal cheerleaders, imagined or with the faces, and more lasciviously, the great bodies of cheerleaders you’ve known in the past, helps greatly. (Except for Cindy Lou, my own memory of cheerleaders is vague and unusable, so I'm always thinking of a one-member squad.)

In terms of self-esteem, having it or losing it, things like Cindy Lou can be a good crutch, useful as that for a while but in the long run just another hindrance. The more quickly you veer from concrete cheerleaders into conceptual replacements, the better. I like masked images myself, because I might get tired of Cindy Lou's face. But like those old time African masks that tribal leaders used to wear, it's always interesting. Say your head is yea wide, yea tall, the average head size. The masks I’m recalling are about four times bigger than the head. And shaped more or less like a shield. Huge eyes, painted features, orangeish, brownish, maybe some yellow thatch design, and may as well throw in a small goatee on the point below the chin.

The whole communal scene would be good for me, which in my experience is best viewed in its stereotypical form. Scenes beyond the stereotype have too many moving parts to keep conjuring actual scenes on the fly, plus you’re worrying, “Is it stereotype? Is it not stereotype?” And obviously you’ve created for yourself a whole new raft of problems. This is true for all of life. Stick to the stereotype and you can’t go too far wrong. Stereotypes were set in place for a reason, because on the average they’re true. And we’re not looking for particulars, we’re not looking for lifelike portraits, we’re not looking for something to bolster some imaginary person’s ego. We’re looking for the life-giving assistance we need for our own self-esteem.

Fragile self-esteem has its own worries, there’s no dispute about that. Bring in, then, the stereotype, use it however you need to to raise your self-esteem. It could even be -- and this is advanced stuff, beware -- that ultimately you will pile all these help aids into a bit imaginary pile and make a soaring bonfire of it, standing back and out of the way so as not to get burnt yourself. When that moment comes for, be bold, be courageous and do it. Just, please, don’t do it prematurely. Because I’ve seen a lot of people live to regret it. “All my African masks (or whatever) are gone up in smoke and now I’m lost!” Be bold, yes, but also beware!

This post is dedicated to Cindy Lou, who married a real jerk.