“Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.” ~Clint Eastwood

If my self-esteem were a little higher, I might stop tripping over it.

Building self-esteem and gaining self-respect takes time and patience.  It is a process of peaks and valleys, twists and turns.  Most of us were not handed a neatly pressed and folded childhood, free of challenges and full of emotional nourishment.

My parents were successful in their own right with degrees after their names, but did that qualify them to properly nurture their children?  Hardly.  Like most parents, they stumbled their way around raising a family, tripping over their own baggage as they muddled through without a handbook or cliff notes.  In short, they did the best they could.

“The best they could” often falls short of the mark and we are left to find our own way with no breadcrumbs to follow.  Herein likes the juice of our existence.  We are here to figure it out on our own – to either unlearn what we were taught or to finally understand what we were shown in our early years.

Would we be as wise if we were simply handed perfect parents?  Would the telling of our stories be as intricate if there were no hurdles to overcome?  Would we be as understanding and compassionate of others if our path had been laid out easily for us?

Let us move past blame of our caregivers.  They provided the rolling hills, steep mountains, stark walls, and empty canyons so that we might discover our way up and out of the valleys, scaling walls and resting upon ledges to reach an astonishing view of ourselves and our capabilities.

They did the best they could.  No blame.  No hills, no view.  Could we have done it better given the same circumstances? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Let us first shore up our own shaky foundation. Each brick, each stone with its own story to tell of the challenges we faced, one upon the other until nearing the top we begin to catch a glimpse of the promising vista of who we are, where we are going, and what we will need to get there.

Enjoy the climb!

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