When I first started my email list for Eclectic Music, I was self-conscious about writing to so many people at once.

I was terrified that I would make a mistake — even a typo — that would cause people to roll their eyes and assume that I didn’t know what I was doing. I worried that I would share an idea that people would think was stupid.

What’s more, I was concerned that I was bothering people every time I sent an email out. I imagined that my relationship with these people was so tenuous and fragile that one false move would crush it. “Now she’s gone too far!” they’d say grimly, deleting the offending missive. “Who does she think she is?”

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If I asked you right now to tell me what you’re really good at or point out a few things you’ve made or accomplished that you’re really proud of, how difficult would that be for you?

Would you be able to state your strengths and accomplishments plainly, without any attempt to minimize them?

Many of us struggle with this. We’re afraid to appear conceited…and maybe afraid of actually becoming conceited.

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A band that I listened to obsessively in my twenties was Belle & Sebastian.

By the time I discovered them, standing mesmerized at a listening station in a Tower Records store in Nashville, the Glaswegian band was already well into their long career. Back then, you had to actually buy the music you wanted to hear; I made a deal with myself that I could buy another Belle & Sebastian album only when I felt really down. For better or worse, I amassed their entire back catalog within two years.

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On Friday afternoons, there's a great little show on Maine Public Radio called Down Memory Lane, hosted by Bangor's Toby Leboutillier (like many Mainahs, he pronounces all the consonants in his Francophonic name).

The show aired on Maine's NPR affiliate stations for decades and now is found only online, and only in realtime. You can find the show by going to mainepublic.org between the hours of 2:00 and 5:00 PM Eastern on Fridays, clicking on the down arrow at the top, and then clicking on "Down Memory Lane." What this looks like on a desktop computer is shown below:

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The stories we tell ourselves can help us our hurt us. The ways in which we measure ourselves can reinforce the awful story or help us to build a new one.

We keep the awful stories out of habit. There’s something comforting about clinging to the story that reinforces what we’ve always believed, even when it makes us feel terrible.

A story like, “I keep thinking I’ll be good at things, but I’m always bad at them.”

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