Believing Yourself

Well I recently have been thinking about what it means to believe in oneself.

According to common knowledge self-esteem is directly related to believing in yourself. And pretty much everything else stems from self esteem.

I've always been sure that I believe in myself and that I have exorbitant amounts of self-esteem. But when I started to delve into the question of believing yourself I hit a wall.

The wall was this. If you can lie to yourself, but you have complete faith in yourself, you will be believing a falsity. And generally, I attempt to stay away from untruths and lies.

So the question has turned into: Do I ever lie to myself? I thought about it long and hard and realized I could easily lie to myself about the question itself. Yes, I do lie to myself.

So, I was then stuck in a dilemma between believing in myself fully and telling myself lies. It was at this time that I began to recognize a new interpretation of what I consider belief in oneself. I no longer consider my thoughts as what I need to believe in. They are going to be both lies and truth, covering a complete range inbetween. The part of myself that I can still hold accountable and which I still believe in is the part that observes those thoughts. The part of me that tries to check every thought for it's validity or for lies, is the part that I believe in. No matter how badly I fail, or the stupid things I say or do. It is so far back in my mind, with such a distance to my external reality that nothing ever comes even close to scratching my belief in it.

It is protected by the knowledge that everything can't turn out right. That I can make mistakes and still have a chance to learn things in the future. It is actually protected from accountability since it never generates it's own actions or ideas, it simple observe those that go before it.

It is me at my most fundamental core, yet you can never actually see it. It like trying to see the inside of a brick. Every time you break it, you only create more surface. (analogy courtesy or Mr. Feynman (he used the brick in a completely different example)).

Kyler