How to stop being shit to yourself

I am shit to myself. It’s a fact. I’m a fuck bucket. I troll myself 24/7.

Every morning as I dress: the troll bleets in my inner ear:

“Hey lard arse, you could stand to lose a couple of hundred million pounds.”

As Im forced to look at my face in the mirror long enough to put on my make up:

“Look what you’ve done to your body, you’re too bad with money to be able to afford to pay a plastic surgeon to fix it for you, what are you going to do, you old lady? Nothing as usual. wtf dude. I expected as much.”

At work, it’s pretty much a unrelenting recurring symphony of :
“You’re shit and you know it, they’re better and that’s how they know it too!”

It’s as if my brain is constantly wired to eliminate the positive and accentuate the negative. About myself. Everyone else is a fucking show reel of perfection in my eyes.

And I realised today that this, this way of thinking, it’s not healthy. Yes, it may seem obvious now I’m saying it. But it’s not. And the first thing to accept is that it has a name:

Low self esteem. It’s not depression, it’s not debilitating. It’s a slow boil of unhelpful thought that’s never really spoken about; because just like restaurant reviews (who am I kidding, we people eat take out more than we go out) people only write about the exceptionally good or horrendously bad aspects. Nobody ever shows up to review a solid 3/5 unless pushed or enticed to do so.

They put up and shut up. They keep calm and carry on.

We, the low self esteemers, (please I need to know there are others out there) I’m calling out to all of you who at your worst, shrug your shoulders when people ask “how are you?” And at best say “I’m ok”.

What you got is low self esteem dude. It’s not a biggy, you don’t need to join a support group or post no make up selfies, all you gotta do is find a way to not be so tough on yourself.

I’m going to find to put down this cigarette and this slice of pizza before I put down myself again. I’m going to find a way to get this troll out of my head and become happier with being me.

So join me, jump out of this comfort zone for the next 365 days, as I try to find the answer we didn’t think to ask:

How to stop being shit to yourself.