If You Settle For Crumbs, You Will Always Be Weak and Starving
Crumbs allow for survival, to go from one place to another over time. They allow you to keep living, but they barely sustain you, dragging down your self-esteem and your hopes. There are too many people who settle for crumbs who have great sensitivity and talent, and too many people savoring the whole cake without the slightest trace of decency and feeling.
If there weren’t people who settled for crumbs, there wouldn’t be big-headed, self-satisfied people, or at least they would have a harder time of things. We are talking about people who create toxic relationships: the sadist with the masochist, the selfless worker and the exploiting boss, the dedicated husband and the demanding wife. The prudent parent and the child turned into a “little tyrant.”
Do you think some of us are born predisposed to settling on crumbs and others capable of eating the whole cake over and over again? Logically, this is not the case.
The ability not to rebel comes from very far back and the result is trapped self-esteem reduced by fears that really are simple shadows, thoughts made of smoke that have no parallel relationship in our reality except for the chains they impose upon the people who have them.
Crumbs just to survive today
Our crumbs to survive today are the hunger and uncertainty of tomorrow. It is not easy to detect when you are being given crumbs and when you are receiving what makes you feel strong and whole. Let us give the example of a woman who is looking for love and continuously stumbles upon men who lie, and moreover, who ignore her, giving her an irrelevant role in their lives.
This woman values love, the feeling of accompaniment, the intimacy of hugs. She needs some dose of this to “keep going.” However, she gives so much and settles for so little that she ends up not finding any of this. She finds a kiss among hundreds of insults, she hears a nice word amongst a great number of actions that contradict it, and she finds herself sleeping with someone whom she knows less and less each day.
Many people think that giving love without expecting anything in return is wonderful. The Machiavellian part of this imbalanced emotional relationship is that by giving so much without receiving, sometimes they end up giving up their self-love completely as well.
Loving without asking for anything in return is giving yourself up limitlessly until you find yourself dried out and exhausted, without anything positive to show in return. Until you end up in a situation where there aren’t any more ports to lay anchor in during the storm.
You do not have to write up a contract to know how much you are willing to lose each time. It’s not a matter of foreseeing possible harm and prejudices. Your self-esteem requires wide open eyes, ears that hear with intelligence, and a memory that knows how to relate what it just experienced with what it really does not want to happen again.
Your self-esteem is not made up of crumbs
You self-esteem does not settle for crumbs. Your self-esteem settles for empathy, assertiveness, and the ability to be independent. Damaged self-esteem is like a worker being rewarded in a totally mediocre way, working hours and hours without a break, without even having the chance to live a life filled with dignity.
Giving everything will never lead us anywhere, nor will putting up with putdowns or dealing with indifference to please others.
If you want to have your self-esteem flourishing and your plans in life within sight rather than drifting at sea, do not let others give you crumbs and see that you are settling for that and even seeming thankful for it, because maybe you have ended up thinking that is the only thing you can aspire to.
The result is a vicious circle: when you end a relationship, you will always be weak and starving, settling for crumbs here and there, without ever being able to savor the whole cake because you have convinced yourself that you do not deserve it, and others believed this, too. This even seems to please them, to favor their comfort and pleasure. Faced with crumbs, indifference.