I posted an introduction on the forum with the other introductions and will try not to just rehash all that. Self-esteem is a huge issue for me. I have over the years built up this inner recurring monologue that just keeps emphasizing negative thoughts about myself. I don't know how to overcome it. I have been in counseling, but had to leave that counselor due to a move. I just haven't really gotten up the initiative and courage (and am living really frugally for the time being) to find another counselor, and hope that they could be as good as the one I was seeing before. I just read the sticky (that I now cannot find, argh), 10 cognitive distortions, and I regularly practice 9 of those 10. It was pretty important to me to see that, but I think I need to see a therapist or just really spend time undoing those patterns of thinking.

What I specifically struggle with, is I feel very juvenile and immature and incompetent a lot of times. I am 27 and unemployed. I actually feel like I am incapable of working; like I won't do a good job at any job and could never be capable of anything other than the lowest-level work. I don't know how to explain it, but I feel like part of me is still a young teenager psychologically. Like I should still be in school, learning what exactly? I'm not even sure if that's it. I've done a lot of things that other people would say was difficult and required a lot of skill and intelligence, including grad school and running my own business as a professional musician. I felt like I didn't do a great job with those things, hence why I am unemployed right now. I have also had my failures; an office asst. position I had was hard for me in that I didn't always understand what was expected of me and just felt really uncomfortable and just had a very difficult time working with that supervisor. I feel like that experience just confirmed how I feel about my aptitudes, or that it was a self-fulfilling pattern because I didn't have confidence and that caused my poor performance.

I really don't know why I feel this way. I think part of it has to do with, I always got really good grades in school and did not have to try that hard; I was underchallenged, particularly in elementary school and even to some extent all the way through high school. But for all of my adult life including college, I think that somehow not believing that I can overcome difficult challenges has led to me always falling somehow short. I always tell myself it's impossible for me to be above average in anything, and that's always how I perform. I'm not sure if it is true that I'm causing this myself, if that really is the reason why I never did outstanding in anything. This issue is, I believe, severely impacting my job search, because I don't believe I have any skills or anything to offer, so how can I possibly convince an employer that I do have anything to offer??

I'm just wondering if any of this makes sense or sounds familiar at all to anyone else. I've never really been able to explain my lack of self-esteem adequately to other people (e.g. my previous therapist). Particularly the part about feeling young, and not feeling capable of working or being excellent at anything. It just doesn't really make sense to me, but I can't just shake it off and not feel that way.