Day 13 and self-esteem

Please post your favourite picture of yourself from 2012, self-portrait or otherwise!
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Now we know that I have a fairly unstated rule
of not putting pictures of anyone on
my blog,
including myself.
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So my favourite pictures will not be here.
I can name them though.
Pictures of myself at my Ottawa and Michigan Bridal showers.
Picture of my Father and I in church
when I came in as Mr. Husband's Bride.
Picture of Mr. Husband and I processing our with our icons.
Other wedding pictures.
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The picture given is Mr. Husband and I on
our couple photo shoot with
our excellent photographers
when I mentioned
how happy I was with my wedding shoes.
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Mr. Husband knows I find it funny
to go a bit against
set traditions
but it was also just being myself;
if Birkenstock made boots
I would be set for life...
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I still have to do the post about
my wedding photographers;
I can tell you for sure
that I choose
correctly
and they could not of been better.
I knew it!
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Planning one's wedding
can be stressful
but at the same time
I love planning
and being creative.
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Reading an essay in the Elizabeth Elliot book
about self-esteem;
it is pretty much spot on
save that I would of used the word pride
for what she is calling self-esteem.
Pride is tricky.
I do think it was in someways a misleading
term to call pride self-esteem.
It is actually not nuanced enough,
I think,
the word self-esteem
and too overused.
Pride is a huge word
and is also overused, misused and well,
let's say trying to be used
for sad destructive events.
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Here is the deal:
sometimes you can be so battered in that
one needs to be re-inflated a bit
not one's ego
but when one is shattered
well,
one is shattered.
I've been there.
Whew, that one year when everything
was going wrong
and I lost my job, there was others so sick
in my life, and loss, loss, loss everywhere.
I was in my most beautiful apartment
and surrounded by loss, threatened loss,
anticipated loss, past, present and future loss.
It was hard.
A dear woman worked with me all that summer
to help me deal with the loss
including of my confidence.
Life can swing us for a real loop
and want to squeeze and push and leave
a half-alive Elizabeth on the ground
dazed.
But you know
that was the year my blog really came alive
in so many ways,
it was when many of you came into my life
and
I came back to myself, slowly, surely
but with many bumps, bruises and
fears.
But I came back.
I learned to fight.
There is a difference between inflated-ego and deflated-ego.
Actually both are linked to pride.
The
I am better than all of you pride
and the
 I am worse than all of you and can't be saved pride.
The latter is also called despair.
Somewhere in the middle
one can begin
if one wants
to desire humility.
Humility saves.
Humility is self-knowledge
knowing strengths, weaknesses
it actually helps
once one is in a place of balance
not of despair of self
or in-love with one self
that perhaps it sounds ironic
but self-condemnation is needed;
in the Orthodox Christian sense
and it comes as a breath of life to a soul
it comes
as in wow
that person is better than me
oh, wait, hmmm, that was stupid of me
to be so insensitive and here
I was thinking that other person was
insensitive
oops...
I can't say I have humility
but I have seen it and
one can fumble trying for it.
All I can say from practical experience
is that it is to try to not judge others
and to judge one's self
as in to remember one is a sinner.
Helps diffuse a lot of disagreements
right off the bat;
i.e. if I remember that I mess-up a million times a day
than if a close friend messes up
or what I think is a mess up
it will not distract me from the fact that
I am a sinner.
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Another way to look at it
my spiritual father talked about this
to me and a lot of what I am writing is based
on what he taught me
and one of the early books he lovingly suggested I read;
anyway it goes like this:
keep the fact that you are a sinner
and
that you are loved by God
equally in mind.
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Anyway,
this is why I think Elizabeth Elliot's use of the word
self-esteem is not nuanced enough
and that the word pride
is going to stand better in what she is describing
and she does it well.