“Self-esteem is what we actually need,” he said, in the way of multiple-year-sober holier-than-thou men, who like to play semantics to up their correcting-you quota. “And self-esteem,” he paused, as if I didn’t know what cliche came next, “self-esteem is earned through estimable acts.”

Bullshit. Nearly as much as exists in the way folks tend to interpret the saying “Before you can love others, you have to love yourself.”

Both, I think, go together. Not just because they are mis-interpreted often.

Let’s start with the second.

My possibly-faulty impression of where “before you love others you have to love yourself” came from is that when I hate myself, the love I have for others can erode me like nothing else. Shivering at the edge, a window outside in the snow in the thick of summer, I can look in at my life and loath my presence in it the way my kid hates a single mistake she’s made in an otherwise wonderful drawing. So yes, in that way. If I wish to survive, I must love myself before I love others.

Far easier said than done.

Yet if I reach that, there’s this: self-esteem is earned through estimable acts.” This one is absolute, no holds barred, purely bullshit.

Think about if it was true. The same way if hard work equaled wealth, single moms with double shifts at McDonalds would be billionaires. If self-esteem equaled estimable acts, ego-ridden men on dating apps would also be very, very kind.

Bullshit. It’s bullshit.

As is everything, frankly, that attempts to make a universal moral code, held by all. Making humans as accountable as Gods, and therefor capable as that myth as well.

I said recently that I didn’t believe any prisons should exist, let alone the death penalty. The woman I said it to did that thing, that squint, relenting, and said the thing everyone always says to this: “Yeah, totally. Except for, like. Pedophiles, or something.”

And I said no, not them either. Because an exception leads to more, because an exception is the way to corruption, because a government that can enslave or kill anyone will do so to everyone, if it suits those in power.

She was angry. People get angry, sometimes. “How can you say that? You have kids!”

“Oh,” I said, “I mean, if someone hurt my kids, I’d just kill ’em.”

“Oh, so you want, like. Anarchy.”

“Fuck no,” I snapped. I was angry. I just wanted to go home at this point; the meeting was over and had, yet again, failed to invoke the comfort and coming-home-ness it used to. “I don’t wanna be able to get away with it. Like, I hope I do. But I don’t want the government to want to let me.”

She didn’t understand.

Let’s have a separation of me and state, though, really.

As a kid I was rocketed back and forth between special ed and special gifted fucking kid. No one knew what to do with me. It did little but raise defenses mostly based in better-than, so fuck-off.

The thing I didn’t understand as a precocious kid with an ego bigger than my soul was this: others can think, too. Others do think, too.

Just because it’s all been set up to null that shit, nip it in the butt, doesn’t mean I’m any smarter than anyone else.

I used to think more. Meditation saved my ass, and I can now kind of go quiet even when there’s a lot happening. Yet before meditation I thought more, and I’d never been so stupid, really.

Agony over others: what they thought, what they’d do, what they wanted of me.

A sponsor from that same program I always bitch about saved me. She asked me “What do you think of them, though? What others think of you is none of your business; tell me what you think of them.”

Good fucking point!

It’s a journey, man. And if I’m lucky it leads to solitude on a screened in porch in the dark and the rain, sipping coffee slow, my phone off beside me, and the ego of my childhood curled soundly and comfortably at my feet.

I miss that part.