The realisation that I have been becoming a less confident person, in some aspects, is not entirely new. It is more evidently felt when I am engaging people, or set myself on some new task - assignments that may not be altogether alien to my experience. It is an unpleasant realisation, made worse knowing that the process can be accumulative and detrimental.
This is not an inferiority complex (neither is it, as this denial may suggest, on the other extreme: narcissism)… this is merely self-awareness.
The lack of confidence, I deduce, stems from not only the lack of independence in thought and action (or rather, the over-reliance on dependence and family), but also the feeling of a lack of control or direction over my life, instead being controlled by forces around me.
I had previously [private post] acknowledged - although not necessary accepted - that my drive to accomplish and achieve has been greatly diminished following a change in philosophy concerning the pursuit of contentment, but I had, in all honesty, not anticipated how this might then affect self-esteem. It is not that I am incapable of controlling how I respond to them - of course, we always have a choice - but the existence of these circumstances does propel me towards certain decisions, to continually make conscious decisions to go against what I would otherwise decide had these forces been absent. It is not healthy, but these forces do exist, and the values that admonish me to submit to them supersede all else.