How Low Self Esteem Can Go

Before I leave the river to move to a farmhouse in Greenwood in 1980, I want to share one last story about how low self esteem can go.  If I thought I had hit rock bottom with the Horse Man, I was wrong. Enter Frank.

By 1980 I was back working as a secretary at RCA in the Purchasing Department. One day a man stopped at my desk to ask for directions to the men's room. What I remember most about that first encounter were his eyes. Hazel with a hint of blue and beautiful. Other than that, he wasn't remarkable. He wasn't unattractive but he wasn't attractive either. His nose was very large but maybe it just seemed enormous due to the fact he had no lips. Well, he had lips, of course, but you couldn't see them--just a horizontal dash line below his nose that opened up when he spoke. He had a thick mane of dark brown hair that sat a little crooked on his head.

His name was Frank and he was a business man attending one of RCA's notorious high pressure negotiation meetings that we sponsored once a year in the fall for our suppliers. These meetings were brutal for our vendors because they started early in the morning and lasted late into the night, with few breaks. The meetings were designed to wear the vendors down, down, down until they agreed to sell us ten million widgets for a half a penny less than they had the year before. Sometimes the meetings would last for several days, which was the case with Frank's widget negotiations.

Every time Frank passed my desk to go to the men's room, he'd find a reason to stop to open his dash line. We talked mostly about Frank and his company and his dogs and his sports car and his mansion and his big boat and his beautiful lawn and his outdoor cats who liked to leave dead mice on his front porch--a porch that was the size of my parents' house. During our one-sided conversations, he never once showed any interest in me. Bingo? Well, maybe bingo, but maybe not. All he had going for him were those hazel with a hint of blue beautiful eyes and that aloof attitude that told me he might not be that into me.

Frank was a leader of men. I could tell by the way his business partners and our executives interacted with him. He was razor-sharp smart with a touch of arrogance and a boatload of confidence. On the last day of negotiations, Frank brought his boatload of confidence over to my desk and asked me for a date. "That would be nice," I said, with a hint of blush.

If Frank was going to be my prince, I'd have to get past some things. First, I'd have to get past his nose to find his dash line so I could kiss him. And every time we did kiss, he'd hold my hands just in case they wanted to do what? Roam around all over his body in search of what? His toupee? Oh, yeah. I knew he had a toupee because every day it sat just a little crooked on his head. One day a little to the left, the next a little to the right. I didn't care that he wore a hair piece. What I did care about were his core values and priorities and his over the top self interest and arrogant confidence and his way of letting me know he wasn't sure about me. Those things mattered to me.

Run, Carol Louise, Run

I didn't run. You knew that already, didn't you? You're so smart. One day, a month into our casual dating, Frank said he needed to see me. Maybe, I thought, this would be the day he realized that he was into me after all.  He'd seen what a good person I was; he'd realized I was a keeper. Now we could start in earnest to have a real relationship. Maybe, I thought, after I got to know the real Frank, he'd turn out to be a good guy.

We sat in his car staring at the granite headstones that dotted the ground before us. He'd picked the graveyard parking lot at Allisonville and Eller Road to tell me something important. For the longest time we sat in silence. To pass the time, I began counting the headstones. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight... "I can't see you anymore," Frank said. There! He said it! He was rejecting me. This man with all the things I had to get past in order to kiss his dash line was rejecting me. "May I ask why?" I said, trying to hide my shock. "I can't tell you," he said. "There's something about you, and I can't tell you what it is, but I can't go out with you anymore." Having said what he needed to say-- "It's not me; it's you" --he started the car, pulled out of the graveyard, and drove me home. I got out of the car, walked in a daze to the front door, let myself in, walked upstairs to my bedroom, climbed into bed fully clothed and stayed there until the next morning.

If I thought I had hit rock bottom with the Horse Man, I was wrong. Frank's rejection crushed the rock at the bottom, and I sunk further down into the muck.

"It's you, not me," the dash line said. The problem was me. Me. I ran down the long list of my deficiencies: small but perky breasts, nasal voice, skinny legs, not pretty enough, stupid laugh. What else? What else? Not smart enough? Don't have a college degree, yet? Just a lowly secretary? What else? What else? Dull and uninteresting? Not a good conversationalist? During lulls in conversation, starts counting things? What else? What else?

The rejection without an explanation was driving me nuts, so what do nutty people do in a case like this? I have no clue what other nutty people do, but this nutty person went to a therapist. It helped. One by one, she pulled all the layers of my convoluted story back to show me how ridiculous it was.  She put my story of rejection into perspective, and it all made sense. Frank didn't put me in the pit. I put myself in the pit. My suffering was self-inflicted. I knew this man wasn't right for me, but he had pushed the button that turned on the switch that started the gears of self-sabotage into motion. My behavior was predictable because I was pre-programed to react to the button, switch, and gears in a specific way. (Think Pavlov's dog.) My subconscious mind was working covertly to satisfy latent emotional needs and it was getting me into trouble. I wanted to place the blame for my bad choices on my father who abandoned his family the day I was born, and my evil step parent, Hazel, who disliked children, and the means kids at school, but I couldn't. I am the only person responsible for my actions and subsequent consequences. The blame stops with me.

One visit to a therapist didn't turn me around. I didn't leave her office cured of low self esteem and self-sabotaging behavior. The hard drive inside me that had been dictating my behavior for thirty-four years was operating at full capacity a few months later when a cowboy from the south side of Indy started pushing buttons that turned on the switch that put the gears of...oh, you know. You've been there with me so many times before.