Self-esteem or skill issue?

I’ve been thinking about whether or not I have low self-esteem. Sometimes I feel like a complete failure and am very, very unsatisfied with myself.

Initially, you would think this is obviously a self-esteem issue. In my view, a self-esteem issue persists despite concrete accomplishments. In other words, whatever you do, you still keep thinking poorly of yourself.

That implies that there’s a competing hypothesis as well: maybe you don’t have a self-esteem issue, but you just haven’t accomplished things up to your standard.

I think this makes much more sense. You have certain standards that you haven’t reached, which makes you feel unsatisfied. If you reach these standards, you’ll change your mind about yourself (or maybe you’ll create new standards at some later time).

So you ask yourself: are there things that I am proud of, where I don’t feel like a failure? For me, there are many such things, which leads me to believe that maybe I do not have self-esteem issues.

I took the Rosenberg self-esteem questionnaire which aims to take a total, global score of your self-esteem.

Taking it, I got the score of 18.

The scale ranges from 0-30. Scores between 15 and 25 are within normal range; scores below 15 suggest low self-esteem.

This is another nail in the coffin of the self-esteem issue hypothesis. I don’t have a poor self-esteem issue. It just seems I have a skill issue.