Sorry to be a naysayer
My opinion for what it’s worth – move on.

By all means be upfront with him about what you want, but be honest, you don’t just want to be friends.
Any “lets be friends” conversation will likely be interpreted as you wanting something more anyway.

Ask for what you really want and be ok with the answer. Yes or no

If you settle for maybe, “lets be friends” in all likelihood he is going to open and close this crack in the door over and over again and your worth more then that.

The end is in the beginning.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Peter.

I have similar struggles with negative thoughts and measuring myself against what I imagine other people’s lives are.

One of the questions I had to wrestle with as i attempted to work through this problem was the question of love itself and what it would look like to ‘love’ myself. Like Joni Mitchell I discovered I didn’t know love at all – “I’ve looked at love from both sides now from give and take, and still somehow it’s love’s illusions I recall I really don’t know love at all”

So essentially I was trying to learn to love myself when I didn’t have a clear picture or idea… of this thing called love.
(Today for me the word love contains qualities of meaning, purpose, accountability, discipline, spontaneity, authenticity… which might at first glance qualities that might appear to contradict but they don’t.)

When you say you don’t love yourself what would loving yourself look like?

I also noted your comment about losing your ego which was also part of the struggle.
In in the west we tend to over identify with our ego – I am my ego, I am what I do, I am the roles I play… While the east negation of the ego has when practice unskillfully I think leads to the loss of sense of self and lethargy. The submission to caste and fate is a natural outcome to the loss of connection to our I and me.

By negation of my ego I could find peace of mind and being (is this love?) but only as long as I removed myself from interaction with life as it was. I noted even Gautama had to leave his family. As I need food and shelter I didn’t see how this was going to work.

It seems to me that what I call the ego was an import part of the whole of who I was and that my attempt to negate it was like cutting off an arm or a leg. Through mediation I understood my ‘I’, my sense of self was not my ego, I was not what I did for a living, I was not my thoughts… I noticed however that it was my sense of I through which I set intention and was the part of me that was conscious. What is aware? I am. Limited though the I is, it is the part of the whole that experiences..

I am not my consciousness yet it is though the I that the I become conscious.

I began to think of my ego not as a CEO or captain but a kind of librarian that filtered information and experience, a communication channel that connected the unconscious, memory, filters… to the conscious and from that intention.

Anyway maybe that doesn’t make any sense or matter…. It just that I know that I’m not alone that my unskillful desire to lose my ego left me feeling listless and disconnected from my experiences (defiantly not love)

The shift from no longer trying to negate my ego but accept my sense of I as playing necessary role in my experience of becoming has help me let go of the negative thinking associated with the labels (usually based on comparison to others) I have applied to myself.

I am not my ego, however my ego is a part of the whole that is me, my authentic self, and as such has value.
The ego wasn’t something I had to lose but acknowledge… and well love

I also recommend the book ‘Learning to Fall’ by Philip Simmons for those fated to having to find the way out by going down.

Came across this Post which said what I was trying to say much better
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/permissiontolive/2012/07/learning-to-fall.html

“Learning to Fall”. I came across this idea recently and it moved me. It’s from Philip Simmon’s book called “Learning to Fall”, and it is written from his perspective as a 35 year old husband, father and teacher diagnosed with a neuromuscular disease which killed him a few years later.

It’s the first time I have ever heard of “The Fall” as anything but this evil horrible disobedience of humanity that has led to all things that are wrong with the world. But it also speaks to me on a very basic level.

I used to think that being a Christian gave me this magic out. If I just lived the “right” way, and did all the “right” things, then life would be peaceful and calm, perfect as god was perfect. Whenever life was hectic, stressful, confusing or imperfect, I thought it was my fault. I just wasn’t being close enough to God.

As time has gone on since I took a break from my perpetual hamster wheel of trying to be close enough to God to be fixed from all my imperfection, I am slowly becoming OK with the imperfect.

I am a woman with an imperfect body, imperfect parenting abilities, imperfect housekeeping abilities, and imperfect relational knowledge. But even if I managed to make all of that perfect, it would still be impossible for me to control everything else. Like death, or illness, or loss of relationship. No matter how good I got at “standing on the solid rock” life was still out of balance.

And now, I’m OK with that. I’m learning to be OK with being unsteady, putting one foot in front of the other and stopping here and there to take a breath and catch my balance. I don’t have to pretend to have it all together anymore. Sometimes I am happy, sometimes I am not. Sometimes I am confident, sometimes I am depressed. Sometimes I feel beautiful, sometimes I don’t. And that doesn’t make me a bad or deficient person. Life throws curve balls. Life changes. Life isn’t always exactly what we planned. But, life is good, even though it isn’t perfect. In fact, all kinds of things are beautiful and good without being perfect. And in learning to be OK with falling, I’ve learned to be unashamed of getting back up. I’ve learned to embrace fear.

Any other ideas on how to function like a normal human through this process?

Your experience of the “supernova” sounds pretty normal to me and I’m impressed with your intention to use the experience to grow with a focus on the positive.

There is a time for all things and perhaps by allowing the “supernova” experience to be normal and accepted as it is, for what it is, you will eventually have fewer of them and or that they not last as long.

Sometimes the simple act of noticing without self-judgment is enough for such moments to pass.

And sometimes… well finding a private corner somewhere and letting yourself feel everything, think everything, blame, cry, curse, grieve… all that stuff, well that that has it place. You just don’t want to get stuck there.

From what I read I don’t think you’re the type of person that will get stuck.
You’re very good at expressing yourself.

For me, an introvert who was taught that other people’s needs came before mine the problem of self-esteem was a problem of how I imagined other people saw me. Through nature and nurture would judge myself on what I thought others thought of me and of course compare my life with how I imagine others’ lives are. Even if others told me I had value I imagined they were just being nice and didn’t mean it.

I was allowing others, imagined others, to define my self-esteem.

You could say that my sense of self and self-esteem wasn’t based on who I was, the things I did, or the roles I took on but on imagination…. And my imagination sucked. Worse i discovered that apparently people, especially strangers, didn’t actually spend much time thinking about me or caring about my self-esteem that I was giving them power over.

One of the first steps in taking ownership of my self-esteem was coming to terms with what it meant to be an introvert in what I felt/feel is a extroverted world. To much of my self-esteem was tied to being ashamed of being a introvert and not being ‘outgoing’, exciting, a story teller, life of the party…

The following books were helpful as I learned the value of being an introvert and how it opened me to experience the world that could be helpful in my career and relationships.

QUIET: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

I had often been told that I “think too much” and should just accept the things I was told. When I talked about what I was thinking about, a problem I was working through, others heard it as being negative or pessimistic… yet I felt optimistic

Thinking about things is part of my nature as was working through problems by identifying issues and strategies for dealing with them. However these well intention influences were telling me not to me.

In The Positive Power of Negative Thinking by Julie Norem I realized that my thinking too much was not being negative but a strategy. I discovered I was an optimist that believed that when I looked at a problem and worked out the ways things might go wrong I could and would correct those issue and everything would work out. You don’t want a strategic extrovert building your bridges you want a defensive introvert.

I guess I’m saying that my sense of self-esteem improved when took ownership of of my nature and nurture. Instead of imagining who I was I worked at finding and examining my nature and nurture. How I do things had value, who I am has value.

I won’t lie I still dream of being the extrovert that everyone loves (I imagine loves) but at my core that’s not me. However that not being me does not have to have any bearing on my sense of worth..

Anyway I hope you well on your quest for self-esteem and it is a quest as only you can find it and in finding it take ownership of it.

Trust your quest and that it has value because it is your quest! Allow yourself to be the person you are, the good the bad and the ugly. Be you!

In the thirteenth-century legend Quest for the Grail, when the vision of the veiled Grail appears to the knights in Arthur’s banquet hall to summon them each to their quest of unveiling it, the knights decide to ride forth singly, for to go in a group would have been shameful. This is the point which Campbell – the greatest mythologist of this century – holds up as testimony to a new moral initiative that is of the essence of European spirituality.

When all the knights had put on their arms, attended Mass and expressed their gratitude to their king, they ‘entered into the forest, at one point and another, there where they saw it to be thickest, all in those places where they found no way or path …. So they start their journey as individuals, each trusting to their own authority and to the mysterious power of their calling. Jules Cashford

Follow your Path

“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” ― Joseph Campbell

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” ― Joseph Campbell

“As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.” ― Joseph Campbell

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Peter.

I could just play all relaxed like they appear to, or to just play dumb and not do things.

That maybe what is known as a Fool’s Choice – These are false dilemmas that suggest we face only two options (both of them bad), when in fact we face several choices.

You can live your truths as you know them, doing your job the best you can because that is who you are without judging, labeling, comparing or imagining how relaxed others appear to be in how they do there work. All this imagining seems to be the source of much of your frustrating.

This Afternoon I went for a walk to a local coffee shop. A man was nice enough to hold the door open for me however I was preoccupied and didn’t acknowledge him with a thank you. The man in an tone a voice that to me indicated annoyance let me know with a load “Your Welcome”

The man of course could not know I was thinking about my mother who had recently past and instead perhaps imagined I was being rude and would teach me manners by a reminder with the ‘Your Welcome”. Perhaps in that moment he needed validation… Of course in that moment I was also imagining I new what the man intention was.

I won’t lie a part of me was embarrassed for my failure at not being present and angry at the man for pointing it out. So we had a moment that was likely negative for both instead of a moment that was gracious for not real reasons

Maybe we were both right – I was being rude and he was only holding open the door to be noticed for his good manners.
But
What if the man could be happy holding open doors for others, not to be thanked, but because that was who he was?
What if I could be grateful for someone holding open a door for me even in those times I’m not fully present. why should we imagine we “knew” what the other intent was and so change a moment of grace into something else

You are correct this God you created in your mind is not going to help you.
To be clear this god of promises is not the idea of ‘G_d’ I was pointing to.

I’m sorry life has not been kinder to you

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Peter.