My personal issues

There were a number of issues that led me to having a low self-esteem.

Without a doubt the biggest problem that affected my life was a speech impediment, called a stutter.

I had started stuttering at the age of four and despite attending numerous forms of speech therapy it continued to ruin my life for the next eighteen years.

Being unable to converse fluently led me to becoming quite shy and reserved.

I could talk perfectly well to myself and felt safe and comfortable in my own company. Even today, after being fluent for the last twelve years, I still enjoy being on my own.

I often think how different my life would have been if I had not had the speech impediment. There is however no real point in looking back and in truth I’m extremely happy with my life at present.

I also had a bald patch in the middle of my scalp which is the size of a ten pence piece. This may well seem quite trivial to some people however it was a big deal for me.

I am also quite short in height for a male, at only 1.65m or 5ft 5in. I was the smallest boy in the class at school and in my group of friends. This led me to feeling as less of a man and as quite a weak person.

The three issues above led me to feeling quite depressed at times. When feeling this way I would eat as a form of comfort.

I have always had a love of the wrong types of food with pizza being a favourite of mine. As you can probably imagine, this soon resulted in me becoming over-weight.

It was like a vicious circle, the fatter I became the more depressed I became. The more depressed I became, the more I would want to eat.

I heard a famous person on the radio a few days ago who stated that she was quite happy and comfortable at having a large frame(fat), somehow I can believe that she is telling the truth.

For me, there seems to be a stigma to people who are over-weight and obese. Perhaps I was paranoid but people always seemed to look down on me.

This was a feeling that I was not happy with and I knew that in the future I would have to attempt to attain a weight that I would be happy with.

An easy target

After leaving school at the age of sixteen, I managed to gain employment at a large insurance company.

My role was quite a basic one as I started on the bottom rung.

The actual work did not really cause me too much stress as I found it rather easy.

The main worry was my fellow workers. It was quite a youthful workforce and it has to be said that it was very much like being at school.

There was quite a lot of what I call “mickey taking” and I was an easy target.

Here was this young lad who had a severe lack of confidence, a stutter, a bald patch, who was over-weight and who was lacking in height.

My colleagues had a field day and on many occasions I went home and had a good cry.

At times I could bare it no more and would end up phoning in sick. In a way I was incapable of working due to the fact that I had not slept during the night because of the worry and stress of the whole situation.

My father has always been a huge support to me, especially during the hardest times and on one evening I decided to visit him to talk about what was happening to me.

He is a very wise man and I was sure that he would be able to offer me some sound advice.

The advice he gave me was rather shocking and is certainly something which I had not thought of and would not normally even contemplate doing.

He stated that if I knocked the so called top dog off his perch then all of the other losers would also fall into line.

What he meant was that if I could stop the main man abusing me then all of the others should also stop.

How should I go about doing this, I asked?

“Well he does not know you from Adam, Steve, or who you are friends with. Get him on his own and have a quiet word to him. Tell him that you have a number of dodgy friends who are aware of how he is treating you. Tell him that they have offered to sort him out for you and that you just have to say the word. Say that if from this moment forward the abuse does not stop then you will say the word and that he can expect a visit etc.”

“I can’t do that, he will laugh at me, possibly even hit me.”

“I personally don’t think he will Steve. If he does we will think of something else. Just give it a go; it is time to become a man. If it works you will feel like the king of the world.”

Now this is something I would certainly not advise other people to do, just in case it did go wrong. I am just telling my own personal story here.

I did decide to give it a go, despite being very scared.

The main man was somebody called Darren. He was a 6ft rugby player and somebody who for obvious reasons I detested.

The next day at worked I asked him if I could have a word with him in the corridor.

I repeated what my father had advised virtually word for word and said it like I meant it; with a few swear words thrown in. It actually felt strangely rather good. Darren did initially laugh at me to which I replied:

“It’s up to you Darren; I thought I would give you the chance to stop first. I actually want you to continue to bully me as I would love my friends to wipe that smile off your ugly face.”

Oh yes – what a man!

Darren did stop abusing me after this point. Life now at work started to become bearable, I was however now twenty-two and had put up with this form of bullying for six years.

This was the start of my new, confident life.

gain more confidence page 5