Self-Esteem Without an Audit: Loving Yourself Without Ever Checking Yourself

Some people make a mistake and spend half the night wondering whether they spoke too loudly.

And then there are people who leave behind a disaster of considerable proportions, sleep like babies, wake up the next morning, post a quote about protecting their peace, and carry on with their lives.

Damn, I envy them.

For a long time, I thought those people simply did not realize what they were doing.

Then I understood that some of them do.

They have simply found a much more comfortable way to live:

there is always an explanation in which they come out looking good.

If they are rude, they have a strong personality.

If they are selfish, they have learned to prioritize themselves.

If they disappear when somebody needs them, they are protecting their energy.

And if you complain after all that, you are probably a toxic person who does not respect their boundaries.

Anybody could sleep eight hours that way.

What is self-esteem without an audit?

Loving yourself is not the problem. Never examining yourself begins to look like one.

I have absolutely nothing against self-esteem.

Quite the opposite.

I wish more people loved themselves well, stopped begging for affection, knew how to say no, left places where they were not wanted, and did not need half the world's approval to feel valuable.

That sounds healthy to me.

The trouble begins when self-love becomes armor.

When every criticism is an attack.

Every boundary is rejection.

Every complaint is toxicity.

And every consequence becomes proof that the world cannot handle somebody so authentic.

It was always somebody else

Five different stories. One character appears in every one of them and never suspects a thing.

The ex was crazy.

The friend was jealous.

The family was toxic.

The coworkers could not handle their brilliance.

The boss feared their potential.

The children were ungrateful.

The partner was too insecure.

You hear enough stories and, at some point, you begin to notice a coincidence.

There is one person who appears in every story.

But that person does not.

That person never suspects a damn thing.

I do not know about you, but I would be terrified to reach a certain age and discover I was the only person who had never been at fault for anything.

Not because we should carry blame that is not ours.

For statistical reasons.

At least one fuckup had to be yours.

Just by participating.

Self-awareness can be wonderful. Poorly managed, it is a nightmare.

You examine your part and theirs. They are examining yours.

That happened to me many times.

Somebody would do something that upset me, and I would launch a full investigation.

What I said.

How I said it.

What had happened before.

Whether I was reacting from an old wound.

Whether maybe I had exaggerated.

Whether the other person was going through a hard time.

While I was writing a doctoral dissertation on my possible contribution to the problem, the other side had already reached a conclusion:

—You're too much.

Right.

Thank you very much for that analysis.

I conducted a three-day investigation, and you solved the whole thing in four words.

One of the most exhausting things is not arguing with somebody who thinks differently. It is arguing with somebody who needs to come out innocent.

Understanding somebody does not mean tolerating them

A person's history can explain a great deal. That does not mean it has to become your sentence.

I was very good at finding explanations for people who, meanwhile, were not looking for a single one for me.

They had a difficult childhood.

Their previous relationship scarred them.

They never learned to communicate.

They are going through a crisis.

Maybe.

All of that may be true.

And all of it may help you understand.

What I do not understand is when understanding the origin of a behavior became an obligation to tolerate it.

Empathy is one thing.

Becoming a rehabilitation center for somebody who will not even admit they have anything to examine is another.

Not everyone who hurts you is a narcissist

Sometimes there is no diagnosis. There is shitty behavior. That is all.

We live in an interesting time.

Somebody ends a four-month relationship, watches five videos, and one week later is talking about narcissistic abuse, avoidant attachment, generational trauma, covert manipulation, and Mercury in retrograde.

I am not doing that.

I am not a psychologist.

And this book is not trying to diagnose anybody either.

Besides, it does not need to.

A person can be selfish without having a disorder.

They can lie.

They can manipulate.

They can be cowardly, irresponsible, opportunistic, or simply an asshole.

Turning every unpleasant behavior into a diagnosis can end up doing exactly what excessive explanations do:

the actual event disappears.

When everything gets tangled, go back to what happened

Before we talk about energy, healing journeys, childhood, and authenticity: what happened?

This may be one of the things I most wish I had learned sooner.

Go back to the fact.

If we agreed on seven and you arrived at nine, we begin with nine.

Then we can talk about your well-being.

If you said you would do something and did not do it, we begin there.

Then we can talk about your expectations, your journey, and what you learned in therapy.

But do not move the damn fact.

All those explanations may contain some truth.

And they may still be used as excuses.

The apologies that begin with sorry and end with a bill for you

‘Sorry, but you also…’ is not always an apology. Sometimes it is an itemized split of the expenses.

I increasingly appreciate people who can apologize without turning the conversation into a documentary about their lives.

I do not need them to kneel.

I do not need tears.

I do not need seven pages of explanation.

I need to know they understood what they did.

Because some apologies begin with ‘sorry,’ and two sentences later we are already negotiating how much of your guilt belongs to me.

And then there is this little gem:

—I'm sorry you felt bad.

That one was carefully engineered.

It does not acknowledge the act.

It acknowledges your reaction.

The behavior strolls calmly out through the other door.

Setting a boundary does not always mean slamming a door

Sometimes the boundary is refusing to explain for the fifth time something they understood the first time.

For years I thought that if somebody did not understand my point, it was because I had failed to explain it properly.

So I explained it better.

I gave examples.

I reconstructed conversations.

I gathered evidence as if some imaginary judge might eventually appear.

Until I understood something considerably less romantic:

many times, they had understood perfectly.

It simply did not serve them to admit it.

That discovery would have saved me an impressive amount of saliva.

And time.

And probably a couple cases of gastritis.

The mirror points this way too

Because writing an entire book about unbearable people and walking away convinced they were always the problem would be an irony too perfect even for me.

Here comes the part that keeps this from becoming a parade of exes, bosses, friends, and relatives with their names changed.

I have also been the difficult person in somebody else's story.

I have judged too quickly.

I have spoken when closing my mouth would have been wiser.

I have told stories in the version that favored me most.

I have wanted to be right.

I have been too much.

And I have been spectacularly confident while being completely wrong.

The difference is not never resembling any of these characters.

The difference is what you do when you finally see yourself.

I am not afraid to admit I have been an asshole.

I would be far more worried if I could never admit it.

The book behind this idea: Gente de mierda con excelente autoestima

Fifteen characters, one mirror, and absolutely no obligation to thank the universe for the experience.

The book grew from a contradiction that would not leave me alone:

people capable of leaving a disaster behind and carrying on through life with admirable confidence.

People who love themselves enormously.

There is nothing wrong with that.

What is remarkable is that some of them never examine themselves.

That is why you will meet the neighborhood narcissist, friends who love you when it suits them, the mediocre boss who thinks he is a visionary, the internet know-it-all, the love expert who never follows their own advice, the abundance influencer drowning in debt, the spiritually toxic, and several other specimens.

And at the end, I appear.

Because if I was going to write about shitty people with excellent self-esteem, the least I could do was check whether I had ever held a membership too.

The book

Gente de mierda con excelente autoestima

How to recognize toxic people, set boundaries, and stop making excuses for those who hurt you. Satire, social observation, and dark humor, without TikTok diagnoses or cardboard enlightenment.

eBookPaperbackHardcover

The goal is not for you to finish this book distrusting everyone.

That would be a fairly miserable way to live too.

The idea is something else.

That you take less time to recognize certain dynamics.

That when somebody tells you they have changed, you do not have to argue.

Wonderful.

We will see.

Because real change has one useful advantage:

you can see it.

And that when a behavior repeats often enough, you do not spend another five years searching for a prettier explanation.

You can understand somebody and set a boundary. You can know their history and walk away. You do not need to turn them into a monster to earn the right to say, ‘This is where I stop.’

Pointing out assholes is fun. Learning to stop making room for them in your life is far more useful.