I was up late last night thinking about a young friend of mine who is having a hard time right now, in large part due to low self-esteem. I always have felt drawn to the topic of self-esteem. Not because I have a particularly high amount myself, but because every once in a while I am blessed with a tiny glimpse of how I imagine God sees and loves certain people in my life and it is remarkable.
Why is it that women in general and especially teenage girls seem to struggle so much with self-esteem? My budding self-esteem was blessed to be nurtured every summer at church girl's camp. I always felt that the leaders and older girls genuinely cared for me, that they liked who I was no matter who I was. That coupled with the spiritual and physical beauty of the camp really hit me at my core each summer. It was somewhere I felt at home, somewhere I always fit in, no matter what else was going on in my life. I still think about those sweet leaders who took time to just listen and care about me, a source outside my home that validated me as a person, and a good person at that. That's part of it, isn't it? Even if our home is good and we are loved, we still are looking for someone outside of it to tell us we are good. Almost as if our families don't count, because they "have to like us". And what if we feel like our families don't like us? How much more do we look to outside sources for that attention/acceptance.
Several different years while in college I spent a week as a counselor at a camp for girls in Utah. I'm not sure how they would describe it, but I always nicknamed it "self-esteem" camp. It was always such an intense week, being responsible for 12 teenage girls (I usually had the 12 or 13 year olds) making sure they were in class, that they were in their rooms at night, teaching them lessons, listening to them, etc. Many of them came from good homes, but many had come from awful life experiences. At age 12. Some of my precious 12 year olds had gone through some of the worst things I could imagine at such young ages. That camp was hard. And every year after it was done when I was exhausted (mostly mentally/emotionally) beyond belief I swore I would never do it again, but I kept doing it. Because I loved it. I loved seeing the way the girls would change over the tiny period of a week. I loved seeing how me and others giving them love and time AND clear rules/boundaries/consequences affected them for good. Because if they didn't get it from somewhere good, where were they going to get it from?
And that's part of it. If you aren't getting enough of what you need from somewhere good, and you already feel bad about yourself for whatever reason, you start to look for it from anywhere you can, or from where it's easy. But that doesn't really help solve the problem, because then you are getting "what you need" and it feels "good" but on some level you know that it isn't really good or what you need at all. (I suppose alternately you sit at home being sad and lonely and that isn't really a great thing either.)
Why don't people know how wonderful they are? And I don't mean in a narcissistic way of course. I mean why don't women and girls understand how important they are, how beautiful they are, how special they are? (I'm not saying dudes are unimportant or anything, I'm just not really addressing them here.)
I think about Ecuador and what I learned with my wonderful baby orphans. I think about how much I learned about love, how much those kids who didn't know me loved me from the start, how they loved me no matter what. I think about how much I still love them, and remembering the intensity with which I felt that love and remembering how I knew then and know now that it was only the tiniest smidgen of how much God loves them and by extension me. Me! It is both unbelievable but true, all at the same time.
How much I wish I could teach someone that today. How much I wish that I could take my friend and hug her and convince her that everything really is going to be ok. And how much I wish I could make her know how beautiful, special, and important she is. Because she is.
And so are you.
