Also and I mean this in all sincerity, but whats the big deal with self esteem. Whats wrong with being just a nice man who treats everyone well? Isn’t that enough. Its like i have to be freaking Catholic superman to get anywhere when all I am is just an average guy. No more no less.
When you settle back into being just a nice fellow–which is undoubtedly what you have been at your happiest–you’ll have an appropriate amount of self-esteem. C.S. Lewis explains appropriate self-esteem very well in his Screwtape Letters, in which a senior tempter explains the situation to a junior tempter:
*…You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.
To anticipate the Enemy’s strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love - a charity and gratitude for all selves, including their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.
His whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man’s mind off the subject of his own value altogether. He would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one. **Your efforts to instill either vainglory or false modesty into the patient will therefore be met from the Enemy’s side with the obvious reminder that a man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his own talents at all, since he can very well go on improving them to the best of his ability without deciding on his own precise niche in the temple of Fame. **You must try to exclude this reminder from the patient’s consciousness at all costs. The Enemy will also try to render real in the patient’s mind a doctrine which they all profess but find it difficult to bring home to their feelings - the doctrine that they did not create themselves, that their talents were given them, and that they might as well be proud of the colour of their hair. But always and by all methods the Enemy’s aim will be to get the patient’s mind off such questions, and yours will be to fix it on them. Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE*
You hit the nail on the head. But its not just the marriage thing its the having a job that actually can pay the bills…half my issue is i don’t know if i’m qualified for anything…the thing is I like it because somehow I remain calm enough that I just protect those kids and make sure they do what they are supposed to) but so can plenty of other people. If anything I worry I don’t stand out.
The thing that will give you long-term satisfaction is how you stand out with the kids. You may find you have the endurance to work with special needs students, or you may not. Each one has his or her own gifts.
Don’t give up on being a teacher just yet. Find yourself someone in the education field to be your mentor. It could be an old professor or it could be an older colleague you worked with. You need help in assessing a) what you want and b) what you can do. It will help you make your decisions with far more confidence.
And again: You’re into some wrong-headed thinking, but the sort of discouragement you’re going through is very common. You should by no means beat yourself up for staggering back with some sense of shock at how hard your profession can be! I know very few teachers who haven’t gone through what you are going through to some extent in their first years of teaching. You need to change your thinking, yes, but by no means should you feel like some sort of failure because you are daunted by what you’re contemplating.
