Compare is Despair: Deconstructing Male Self-Esteem
I wrote a piece last year titled “Why Being ‘Too Hard on Yourself’ is Selfish”, and the following paints a broader picture of what lives deep inside of those feelings and thoughts.
It’s the end of November, which for many men like me, means finally dusting off your razor after a month of growing questionable facial hair at best. I first heard of Movember when I was in high school, and the “Save a bro, grow a mo” motto seemed to make sense as much of the focus of the foundation was advocating for men’s cancer.
However, both within and outside of the issues of physical health such as prostate and testicular cancer lies the mental struggle that a huge portion of men are silently dealing with, and Movember’s campaigns have shifted in this direction as the looming male mental health crisis continues. Since this tradition has been around, I’ve noticed that it becomes very easy to get lost in act of growing a moustache instead of focusing on the why of growing that moustache in the first place. As the struggle drudges on for many of our brothers, to me, this is one of many outlets for a man to signify his recognition of the need to support his fellow men in their silent struggle. Or at least that’s the way I hope the message is translated.
While women are far more likely to be diagnosed with depression and attempt suicide, the looming evidence of men’s silent struggle lies in the fact that the US rate of suicide is 3.5 times higher for men. Even further, the Movember Foundation states that three-out-of-four suicides in Canada are men, which has been advertised in their campaigns this year. Take that in for a second, because those numbers really don’t make sense.
Terrence Real, esteemed male-centric psychotherapist and author of “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” is a bit of a grandfather of making sense of this discrepancy. In the 1997 book, he focuses on the silent struggle of male depression and calls to action men of all walks of life to fight against it through an approach that is ever so relevant today. He argues that if you add in the disproportionate number of men who struggle with addiction and those silently struggling with what he refers to as “covert depression”, the scales will tip in favour of men.
The thesis of his work and a possible explanation of the many of our fellow men’s silent struggle is that men are brought up believing who they are is not enough, and they instead feel they have to earn connection. Coined as “Icarus Syndrome”, our societal pressures construct the ideal of having to fly into the sun just to be worthy of hearth and home.
Instead of being taught inside-out healthy self-esteem, men often grow up with outside-in false esteems, which concentrate into three categories. There’s Other-Based Esteem; I have worth because you think I do. Then we have Attribute-Based Esteem; I have worth because of what I have. Finally, there’s Performance-Based Esteem; I have worth because of what I can do, which affects a large portion of men.
All of these esteems are codependent, meaning the person is dependent on something outward to satisfy them inwardly instead of the other way around. Whether it’s the opinions of your peers on how great of a person you are or that fancy new car you just bought, the sense of momentary grandiosity that these things give us comes only from the outside.
Hindsight
While it can be easy to see how these all could affect each and every one of us in various situations, the one I’ve struggle with most is a performance-based esteem. Since I can remember, it’s been an easy hole to fall into in order to feel fulfilled. From small town upbringing where parents are obsessed with their kid’s athletic ability, to ultra-competitive business school where I was ranked against my peers, to competitive post-graduate work environment, I’ve lived my whole life feeling the need to find worth in how I perform in sport, school, or anything really.
Throughout high school and university, there always seemed like a mold that I needed to fit. Especially when there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to socioeconomic background and ethnicity, it felt sometimes like I was living in a world that bred idealism. The problem for me though was not in trying desperately to fit that mold, but in thinking that everyone else I knew fit it. I was comparing my insides to other people’s outsides and lived codependent on the image of the false self I had constructed.
It would take a whole book to recount all of the experiences I had as a kid where I was overly competitive for no reason because I derived my worth from on how I performed in comparison to others. In this way, a performance-based esteem can even coincide with an other-based esteem, since it’s the dependency on image that keeps the cycle churning. The story of Narcissus in Greek mythology goes along closely with this idea and serves as a further explanation.
Although much of what we determine a narcissist to be these days stems from this tragic hero, we have a common misunderstanding that narcissism is a matter of too much self-love instead of too little. It wasn’t because Narcissus had too much self-love that he couldn’t look away from his reflection, it was rather his addiction and dependency on his image that was his tragic flaw.
Unfortunately though, there’s no way out of this except the hard way sometimes. While I have several personal examples of my performance-based esteem working against me, the biggest struggle with letting go of it has been in scenarios where I misidentified it as being my “edge”. One example that comes to mind was in 2018 when I committed to running a marathon, and challenged myself to do it in three hours and ten minutes (note that this was with no prior marathon experience). It was my first year after finishing school and I had several other developing parts of my life, but it seemed like something to do in order to challenge my mental and physical capabilities.
Finding the time to train to compete instead of complete then became extremely difficult as I tried to also progress professionally and socially, and I realized quickly how thinly I was spreading myself. That didn’t stop me though; I had reached nearly every goal I set in the five years prior of school and work, so I knew I would make it happen.
Well…I thought wrong, the Icarus Syndrome kicked in, and I flew a bit too close to the sun. Blowing up with injuries from the beginning was dooming, the goal itself was unrealistic which made me constantly anxious, and after a final injury less than two months out, I made the very tough decision to bow out.
The process of reflecting on what had happened was crushing and although it seemed like a defeat at the time, I became empowered by something that would serve me well from then forward. When I thought back to why I decided to commit to it in the first place, I was left with several questions; one of them being “Did I really want to do this or did I just want the title of being a marathon runner?”
In all that planning, I failed to have a real reason why beyond “challenging my mental and physical capabilities”. I had become intrigued by several people I knew running marathons or committing to doing so instead of thinking of what I really wanted to do and whether or not that was going to give me the sense of purpose I was looking for.
In hindsight, I tried to climb a mountain just to prove how big I was and there was nothing meaningful for me on the way up except that. But as Persig goes on to say in a second reflection on mountains:
“To live for a future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top”.
The living isn’t in the comparison or the destination, but rather in the getting there.
Foresight
You learn a lot from failing about your capacity to fail, and with a performance-based esteem added to it, the anxiety of failing often outweighs the failure itself.
While hindsight will (hopefully) always be twenty-twenty, it should be a signal to our foresight to not repeatedly make the same mistakes over and over again. Once we identify the aspects of our esteems that seek affirmation from the outside, we can repair the inside by consciously applying the lesson’s we’ve learned. Learning and applying foresight gives you the power to identify the space between action and your reaction, or “stimulus and response”, as Victor Frankl wrote in “Man’s Search for Meaning”. From there, we can apply strategies to decondition false senses of esteem, whether performance, attribute, or other based.
The hardest part about moving onwards and upwards from the failures caused by our esteem (or lack there of) is realizing the consistency needed to uproot the false esteems in the long term. These insecurities aren’t just things that go away for good once you pay attention to them for a while, they require constant attention “or they’ll go to the cellar of your soul and lift weights” as musician Amanda Palmer put it so elegantly. The battle is long, hard, and often frustrating beyond comprehension when trying to reverse the cycle of shame and grandiosity, and requires constant maintenance and conscious learning.
For me, this manifests most days in writing a short letter to myself at the end of a day to separate how I perform from who I am. This is to resist the temptation to let my performance dictate the tone of how my day went. Often with reference to the recreational activity I do for the day, which is usually yoga nowadays, it goes something like this:
“Hey Matt, great job today in your yoga practice today. That headstand looked great today, but I just want to remind you that it doesn’t make you a better person today than you were yesterday when you could barely balance on your hands, and you’re no better of a friend, or better at your job for that matter because of how you performed today.”
Although this may seem menial and even a bit silly, it’s been a powerful tool for me to decouple performance and self from each other. The silly part is rather that I can be insecure enough at times to let this be the source of my self-esteem. And if you’re one of those people who thinks this is silly, think of the last time your sports team lost a really close game and how that affected you for the rest of day. If you let outer sources like any of these affect your happiness, you’re destined to be miserable.
Moving On and Moving Up
An additional decoupling activity I recommend for performance-based esteems is learning and reading about those who transcend competition in places we traditionally associate with performance. For example, Laird Hamilton is widely regarded as the greatest big wave surfer of all time, but few know that he’s never competed in surfing competition before!
A second example are the Tarahumara people of Mexico, subjects of the book “Born to Run” and widely regarded as the greatest distance running community in the world. For many years, they wouldn’t allow any outside people into their tribe to study them (especially Americans) because they feared the materialism and competition of the developed world would exploit their use of activity. All they wanted to do was be with their brothers and sisters and run together out of pure love and desire to explore their environment.
My failure to run a marathon was the final straw that has led to over two years of conscious noticing, finding space, and improving on how to commit my time, especially in the realm of hobbies and recreational activities. It was what first made me fall into things like yoga (which I now teach) or getting back into skiing. It forced me to re-examine what gives me fulfillment in my life, and although there’s still a long road ahead, I’m forever grateful for this failure.
Compare is despair, and only you can be the source of your own happiness. Onwards and upwards my friends.
