You can become a better person,
I did

by Charles
(Milton Keynes, United Kingdom)

This is a story about self-esteem, or rather the lack of it. When I was five, I walked home from school with my cousin Debbie. Our grandmother met us at the door and said 'Your Mum's here.' I shouted out 'MUM'. Then Grandma said, 'No, not your Mum. Debbie's Mum'. I wanted the ground to swallow me up. And that feeling of wanting the ground to swallow me up did not go away until I was eighteen. I mean that, it was that bad. I was the shyest teenager you could ever meet.

Then I discovered alcohol. The effects were amazing. Overnight I became the life and soul of the party, making people laugh and ending up in bed with loads of girls. But it was just a temporary fix, because I would wake up in the morning not remembering anything about the night before, and certainly not knowing who was in bed beside me.

And then a very wise man told me 'You are in life precisely where you have chosen to be.' I did not want to hear that at all. How dare he talk to me like that. But fortunately I listened to him, and he showed me how to change by introducing me to self-help.

That day has become one of the highlights of my life. I read every self-help book I could lay my hands on, and worked on me, identifying my problems and doing something about them. Slowly, and very painfully, I learnt how to become a better person, and learnt to love myself. And a very remarkable thing happened - from having no friends, I had loads of friends and the ladies started queuing up to love me rather than have sex with me.

If I can do it, so can anybody else. The process is not easy, but it is very, very simple.