How Do You Gain Self-Esteem?

How do you do it? How do you maintain your confidence, your self-esteem? I just...can't seem to do it. It's just rejection after rejection after rejection, and I do find a girl, and she leaves me for my best friend, and then it's back to rejections... and I just get to the point that I have to accept that it's just me. That it has nothing to do with the girls, that I'm just not a desirable person.

And it's not just that... I've spent the last two years of my college life in a major that I ended up hating every second of, and when I finally decided I had had enough, and dropped out for a year to decide what I wanted in life, everyone I knew considered me to be a failure. I was at the point that I didn't even want to go out in my own hometown for fear of the looks I would get. I hated it. I'm back in school now, as an education major, but I still see those looks every day, that look of failure, of disappointment. And I'm at the point that I believe it myself, and just end up feeling that I have no worth, no value, that nothing I do matters.

I wasn't always like this... I used to be a happy guy, joking around, having fun. I wasn't the life of the party by any means, but I wasn't this sick depressing shell of a person that I am now. How do you regain lost self-esteem so that you can feel like a person that deserves a girl, rather than a person that a girl would have to lower herself to agree to?

Try keeping your glass half full, instead of crashing to the floor. Laugh every single day, and never take rejection on a personal level.

Have a positive outlook on things. Make some friends, get out and mix with people of all different backgrounds. Amazing what you may learn about yourself.

I do laugh every single day. I laugh a lot. I'm a comic strip artist in my spare time, I watch funny videos and movies, etc. It just doesn't help. Laughing's like taking drinking a cup of coffee instead of sleeping; it helps while it's in your system, but once it's out, you feel worse than ever.

As far as not taking rejection on a personal level, how can you not? They're essentially saying a) you're not good enough for them or b) there's something appalling enough about you that they don't even want to give you a chance. I can't count the number of times I've met girls online that loved talking to me, but then I never hear from them again once I meet them in person. How can you not take that on a personal level?

Making friends... that goes back to the other part, about not even wanting to go out. I'm too embarrassed by my own situation to meet people. I'm too embarrassed by the social unacceptability of my own hobbies to feel comfortable telling other people who I am, and what I like to do.

It's easy to say have a positive outlook, but it's not a switch you can flip, and just wake up feeling better about yourself. I have no reason to feel better about myself, no reason to feel that my cup is half full, or to even just be glad that it has anything in it at all. My cup's more like that cup that's been sitting too long; everything's evaporated out of it, and it's been there so long and no one knows whose it is, so they don't want to drink it, but are too lazy to dump it out.