How to Crush Your Self-Esteem
You’ve got this!
Start off Strong
First, be born with a vagina. The odds are roughly fifty-fifty here so we’re starting strong.
Join a Big Family
Ideally, have a bunch of sisters you can be competitive with and who constantly remind you of your failings. The eldest should be especially overbearing. This will help ensure that any self-esteem you’ve brought with you from the womb or that you pick up early on will be gradually and consistently picked away at, like old nail polish.
Help the Youth
When you’re in elementary school, volunteer to read picture books to the younger kids because, hey, why not, books are good, right? The apparent harmlessness of the whole thing will help drop your guard. Then, when you sit in front of the kids waiting expectantly in a semi-circle around you, ensure that your chair breaks and you fall to the floor to a lot of laughing. This creates the ideal opportunity for the teacher to call you fat. In front of everyone.
Focus on Your Body
In the evening, when your burning cheeks have finally calmed, you will look in the mirror and ask for the first time but definitely not the last: “Is this what fat looks like?” You begin to understand that fat is something you’re supposed to be ashamed of. The next day you will go to school with an untucked shirt and bulky sweater for protection, forming the basis of your wardrobe for, oh, fifteen years.
Go Through Changes
Now the really fun stuff. Go to high school. And sprinkle on a hefty dose of puberty at the same time. This is where you’ll find your self-esteem bottom out. To help guarantee you destroy any hope of it flaring up to protect you, get blindsided by the inopportune arrival of your period during a grade nine math test. Unable to sit down in your chair for fear of leaving a stain, you’ll stand next to your desk like a volunteer to the Queen’s Guard with wads of toilet paper balled up in your underwear. A rumor will spread, and pretty soon everyone in class will transform into vampires, staring at your crotch with hopes of spotting even the tiniest speck of blood.
Embrace Pop Culture
Don’t forget to watch television. And movies. Pay particular attention to what the women on screens look like and how they act. Strive to be like them, these big-eyed, open-lipped, soft-spoken unicorns of femininity. You’ll get the gist of it quickly enough: be skinny yet chesty, maternal yet sexy, deferential to men, polite and nice at all costs. Oh, and always long to find a man to fulfill all your dreams, whether you want one or not.
Make Friends
Next up, get some girlfriends. Girlfriends are the best because any trace of remaining self-esteem will be asphyxiated under the weight of their attempts to give you a “much needed” makeover. Girlfriends are crucial. Not just one girlfriend, you need a whole pack. Like werewolves.
Add Some Romance
It’s time for the boyfriend. Not just any boyfriend — you need one who thinks he’s better than you, and probably everyone else he’s ever met. A boyfriend who constantly reminds you of your myriad shortcomings. By this point in your development you should find yourself naturally gravitating to men of this nature as you will understand that you’re lucky to have any boyfriend at all, even if he’s a bit of a dick.
Enter the Workforce
Now, get a job. Not just any job, take a job where you sit at a desk in front of the office of your much-older boss who says he respects your contribution to the team and that he likes the way your tits look in that shirt. Answer phone calls with the required sunshiney voice and smile at everyone and type on your computer with long fingernails like you’re tapping out Morse code distress calls. Tell people that you’re an “assistant” but really mean “pet.”
Try Romance Again
Finally, get a new boyfriend. This time you’ll find a more mature man, a more wordly man, who has a nice car and frequents trendy restaurants. So, when he tells you it’s too bad you don’t like the birth control pill because he’s allergic to condoms and it really is, after all, your problem, you’ll understand where he’s coming from.
Relinquish Power
Then, let the new boyfriend dump you after he cheats on you. Don’t dump him, of course, because really, in some way, it’s your fault. All of it.
Congratulations!
You have successfully crushed your self-esteem. You can now spend the next twenty years of your life fighting to get it back.
And that fight, that gritted-teeth, damn-it-I-deserve-better-than-this determination that you’ll need to scrape some semblance of your authentic self back together, that is the stuff that will lay the rock-hard foundation to the greatest temple ever built, to the most wondrous deity of them all: you.
