The Geometry of Worth

You know what nobody tells you about low self-esteem?

It’s not actually about you.

I mean, it feels like it’s about you. God, does it feel personal. Every stumble, every awkward silence, every moment where you watched someone else glide through something you found impossibly hard… it all seems to point to the same grim conclusion.

But here’s the thing.

Low self-esteem isn’t a verdict on your character. It’s a mismatch between who you are and the systems that measure you.

And those systems? They’re rubbish at measuring humans.

The Slot Machine Problem

Think about the last time you filled out a form.

Name. Age. Occupation. Marital status. Income bracket.

Neat little boxes. Dropdown menus. Radio buttons that only let you pick one thing when you’re secretly seven things at once.

The form doesn’t care about nuance. It can’t hold contradiction. It needs you to be simplified, categorised, and filed away.

And fair enough… forms are just forms.

But we’ve started treating people like forms.

School does it first. You’re either good at maths or you’re not. Either sporty or academic. Either well-behaved or a problem. The system can’t deal with a kid who’s brilliant on Tuesdays and completely lost on Thursdays. Can’t accommodate someone who thinks in spirals instead of straight lines.

So it labels you.

Then work does it. Are you a leader or a follower? Strategic or detail-oriented? Good with people or better with data?

Pick a lane. Stick to it. Make yourself legible.

And here’s where it gets insidious.

After enough years of being sorted, assessed, and slotted… You start doing it to yourself.

You internalise the categories.

You look at other people and think, “They’re confident. I’m not.”

As if confidence were a fixed trait you either got issued or didn’t. As if it’s not something that appears and disappears depending on context, energy, who’s in the room, and whether you’ve eaten lunch.

The system taught you to see yourself as a collection of static attributes.

But you’re not.

You’re a process.

Why Aristotle Knew More About Self-Worth Than Your Therapist

There’s this idea from Aristotle that’s become a bit of a cliché, but it’s cliché because it’s true.

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

He was talking about living things. About how a heart, lungs, brain, blood… none of those things are you. But arranged correctly? Suddenly, there’s consciousness. Memory. The ability to fall in love or argue about whether Die Hard is a Christmas film.

(It is, obviously.)

The point is: arrangement matters more than components.

And yet we’ve spent our entire lives being told the opposite.

We’ve been taught to audit ourselves. To pull ourselves apart and assess each bit in isolation.

Am I smart? Attractive? Funny? Disciplined? Likeable?

Then we compare those bits to someone else’s highlight reel and feel like we came up short.

But no one lives as a bit.

They live as an arrangement.

A shy person in a loud, performance-driven environment looks broken. The same person in a role where listening, noticing, thinking before speaking… suddenly they’re the most valuable person in the room.

A scattered thinker in a rigid, process-heavy job looks incompetent. Same mind in a fluid, exploratory space? They’re connecting dots no one else can see.

Low self-esteem often isn’t evidence of inadequacy.

It’s evidence of misalignment.

You were judged by metrics you were never designed to optimise for. And when that happens early enough… when it happens repeatedly enough… you stop asking, “Where do I actually function well?”

And start asking, “What’s wrong with me?”

That one question can eat decades.

The Thing About Emergence

Here’s where it gets properly interesting.

In complex systems, the most important properties don’t exist in any single part. They emerge from interaction.

Consciousness doesn’t live in a neuron. Music doesn’t live in a note. Meaning doesn’t live in a single word.

And self-worth doesn’t live in a single trait.

It emerges.

Over time. Through experience, contradiction, failure, reflection, repair, and growth.

Which is why people who’ve been through absolute hell often carry more presence, depth, and quiet authority than people who did everything “right.”

Because systems that get stressed adapt.

They reorganise. They integrate. They figure out what actually matters versus what they were told should matter.

A person who’s never been broken has never had to put themselves back together.

They remain a collection of shiny, disconnected parts.

Meanwhile, someone who’s struggled has built coherence out of chaos.

And coherence… people feel that.

Even if they can’t articulate it.

Even if the person carrying it doesn’t recognise it in themselves yet.

This is why people with low self-esteem are so often misread.

They think their doubt disqualifies them.

Others sense their complexity and instinctively trust them.

The Uncomfortable Bit

Modern culture needs you to believe you’re just parts.

Replaceable. Upgradable. Disposable.

Because if you see yourself as a component, you’ll spend your whole life trying to improve yourself into acceptability.

Buy the course. Fix the flaw. Adopt the habit. Optimise the weakness.

There’s nothing wrong with growth, obviously.

Unless it’s driven by the belief that you’re currently insufficient.

Growth rooted in shame doesn’t end.

It just finds new targets.

But when you start seeing yourself as a system…

Everything changes.

Healing becomes integration, not repair.

Confidence becomes coherence, not performance.

Worth becomes inherent, not conditional.

You stop trying to erase parts of yourself.

And start asking better questions.

What am I learning to combine?

What patterns am I outgrowing?

What contexts bring out the best interactions within me?

And perhaps the most liberating question of all…

What if nothing about me is accidental?

What if your temperament, timing, scars, hesitations, contradictions, and oddities aren’t design flaws?

What if they’re necessary ingredients in a system that hasn’t finished unfolding yet?

Because systems don’t reveal their purpose at the start.

They reveal it in motion.

The Unfinished Argument

So if you feel unfinished… uncertain… quietly inadequate most days…

Maybe that’s not evidence of failure.

Maybe it’s evidence that you’re still assembling something larger than any single moment can explain.

You’re not broken.

You’re mid-process.

And the world, with its forms and categories and dropdown menus, was never built to hold that truth.

But you can.

Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham