I'm doing the 12 Steps which are, amidst other things, about accountability for your part in actions that have damaged you and/or others. For someone who has experienced a lot of debilitating guilt in the past this is quite a tall order. However, through sobriety and meditation, I'm finding that I'm able to view my incidents, actions or behaviours through a relatively dispassionate perspective, allowing for a quite objective process. It doesn't aim to lay blame or apply guilt, but instead looks to understand the machinations involved to result in the fallout you're investigating. I think this is a real space for growth.

There are definitely different ways of looking at life, but generally flexibility and adaptability will serve you better than stubbornness and selfishness. If people try to take advantage of you, you need to find ways to protect yourself. Sometimes easier said than done.

1000% this. It's important to acknowledge how much other people don't know things or wing it or are faking it and whatnot, to help mitigate the impostor syndrome and low self-esteem, though those are not always sufficient, admittedly (I'm exhibit A lmao). It really does seem to be about doing your best to accept that everything is tentative and best guesses, based on convention and rarely are things hard and fast, etc.

The abuse of being willing to admit faults is a whole other ball game. But at least for the personal individual matters, even being willing to admit fault and apologize shows that one generally knows when an error was made, and that knowing can then potentially be used to alleviate impostor syndrome and low self-esteem, because it can be used to make one's self better. That's way easier said than done, and someone might just as easily feel worse when admitting an error (hi, it's me again), but it doesn't have to be that way.

This is a really cloudy area to talk about as it's super abstract, but I do wanna try to outline a certain path that helped me a little. Political stuff I've read has always involved a lot of self-criticism, but the last couple years I've read a lot that has involved taking in way more perspectives and academic research than usual. It's helped me see that how things are framed matters immensely and that usually most perspectives have something to contribute. This has helped me become totally fine seeing when something a political opponent says is correct, or when someone points out something bad about me or something. I'll freely admit that, but just incorporate it into the frame and/or reshape the frame of the conversation or interaction based on whether or not it's relevant, how it is, how it does or does not change anything, etc. And I'll freely admit when I don't know something and don't know how it affects the framework of something. Because everything's tentative. I realize this may all sound meaningless because I'm not giving a lot of detail, it's just super hard to talk about without going insanely in-depth if someone hasn't gone through a similar intellectual path (I realize how unbelievably pretentious that phrasing is, I just can't think of any other way to put it lmao). But basically, reading and learning lots of self-criticism of my own and similar political tendencies, learning a bit about the vast amount of research on subjects involved in political stuff that's emphasized in those tendencies, seeing how nuanced and controversial and surprising and ingenious and whatnot that that research can be, seeing how various perspectives color one's interpretation of the world and the ways they do and don't contribute things that are true, all helped me be more okay with the tentativeness of my own understanding of things and how it can change, especially when encountering new or different understandings.

Again, that's not all necessarily sufficient for alleviating low self-esteem, but it could possibly help.

You make this sound like a big deal, but it's as simple as "you're not always going to be right and you're not always going to be wrong".

> The never-admit-your-wrong-or-say-sorry personalitiny

Ie, egomaniacal. There's probably some fancier term for it in the latest DSM.

less stressful? no doubt about it. but the collateral damage you will probably cause to the people around you would be incalculable.