Yep. I struggled with this a lot in high school and college. It led to poor grades and taking extra years I couldn't really afford at the time to finish college

Yep. I struggled with this a lot in high school and college. It led to poor grades and taking extra years I couldn't really afford at the time to finish college. This was a conflict between my low self esteem and modest ambition to finish school and start a career. I worried constantly if I was really going to fail at something so simple. This generated so much distracting anxiety for me until I finally upped the dose on the usual self-medication (mostly booze) to turn my brain off and just start doing things. A few years later I finally awoke from those hazier times in a much happier place making a decent living. Mine is definitely not a unique story, but I just wanted to agree that our culture largely ignores low self esteem because it's one of the hardest problems to fix.