Insecurities

What is insecurity? Well in simple terms, its vulnerable self image, the feeling of not being good enough and uncomfortable in certain places or situations, leading to overthinking, panic, fear of missing out and many to name such.

What exactly causes insecurity? Well there a few thousand reasons which leads to insecurity like past traumas, financial state, bad academic performance, bullying, certain physical deformity, mental health issues etc. People become insecure in the most minuscule situations like not getting quick replies even when the other person is online, judging yourself on the basis of what he/she wearing in a social gathering, eating in a restaurant and being anxious about what others might think about the choice of food and whatnot. The notion of doing things differently and not following the crowd is the source of all insecurities, cause the first thought that comes to mind is what if I fail doing things in a unique way, what will people and society think of me. Will I be ever respected and accepted because of my difference with others. Overthinking leads to insecurity and vice versa and thus we fall prey to a vicious cycle. The society has a huge role to play in it. Everyone is deemed to look certain way, talk in a certain way, walk etc and people who beg to differ from those certain norms, have been made to feel unwelcomed by so called educated society, who are nothing but narrow minded hypocrites. They dont accept differences and in turn makes people feel worse about themselves.

So why is insecurity so prevalent in today’s society? The simple but a huge reason is developement in communications. We all are highly active on social media and daily we come across millions of posts of people enjoying, flaunting their perfect physique and beauty, fake news etc. What constantly going through these posts does to us it creates a fake image of happiness in our minds. We perceive to be happy we need a well dressed cool gang or a perfect physique to few thousands followers. We need to be good in english, we need to be upto date with the social media lingo or else people wont like us. Without these so called cool traits we are pretty useless and will always be looked down upon. We dont realise that people will always post about happy moments on social media( we all have our share of happiness and sorrow in our lives), that doesnt mean they are totally happy in their lives. Seeing the so called happy moments in others life makes us feel terrible about ourselves. We judge ourselves harshly on our looks, height, physique, skin colour, hair etc. We just think a fair skin, or a straight hair looks beautiful and deem other as ugly. To add to that our parents from the very beginning have compared us to a lot of others, who in a way is better than us in certain qualities and deemed us a faliure. Whether be it sports or academics we were all compared to someone who is better than us and thus made us feel inferior despite of a good performance. Our parents( atleast of most of ours) never realised that comparing us with others, strips us of our uniqueness, makes us feel we are not good enough and thus creating a mental image that we are inferior. This also happens due to friends, relatives, neighbours etc. Making a budding guitarist feel inferior because of his academics or a future doctor due to his performance in sports made us feel bad, lonely, traumatised. And the worst part is we let those opinions affect us because we CARED. We cared about our parent’s opinion, we craved for their love and attention and when we dont get that we just feel we are not worthy of love and we are not good enough. We and they never realised we as humans cant excel in everything. God has given all of us certain flaws and limitations. Comparing ourselves with others, makes us feel bad for our flaws while forgetting to cherish the qualities we have.

My personal experience-

Just like others I have my fair share of insecurities. Right from being made fun of in high school because of being a shy quite, nerd to be deemed not attractive by the girl I was crushing on just broke my self image. On top of that parents comparing my grades, my rank with others not knowing what I am going through just made me feel like a complete faliure. Years and years of that just gave me truckload of insecurities like I am not worthy of love, I am not smart enough like the other guy. Also me being an introvert being classified as ‘unsmart’ by my parents cause I have difficulties in keeping a conversation going. Plus being bought in an Indian household I had to hear things like if you dont dress like these, if you dont do these no one will like you. If you dont excel in studies no one will like you. This things just made me push myself so much and I actually lost my true identity and a constant thought of being a loser and not good enough constantly lingers in my head. Thoughts like why he/she isnt picking up my phone that means they dont wanna talk to me anymore to if I dont get good grades I will lose my friends.I was completely insecured about my looks, height, skin colour, way of talking, grades, rank etc.

How did I overcome my insecurities?

Well to be honest I am still fighting it. Sharing with close friends, seniors helps a ton cause we all have certain things we are worried about. Being vulnerable with close ones isn’t a bad thing at all. Plus I have come in terms with the fact that I wont excel at everything, everyone wont like me, I will fail once again, we all do trust me we all have flaws. Not doing things in a certain way actually helps cause ones you stop caring what others think you live freely. We dont need to follow certain norms, we can and will have differences with others but will still be happy. Respecting other’s opinion( even if you differ) will just buy their respect for me. We dont need to be good looking, charming, to be happy. We just need the perfect company( trust me we all get that). Other things dont need to go in our favour. We still will be happy. We just need to keep doing things which makes us feel happy not caring about the results not overthinking and rather thinking practically in a given situation and strictly not comparing ourselves with others( cause we all are in different situations in our respective lives). Everything else just falls into place