Pathetic

pathetic |pəˈθetik|adjective1 arousing pity, esp. through vulnerability or sadness : she looked so pathetic that I bent down to comfort her. See note at moving .• informal miserably inadequate : his test scores in Chemistry were pathetic.2 archaic relating to the emotions.
When I was in elementary school I had a bully, well I had lots of them, but my first real one was several grades older than me and brutal.  All because I had offended her by wearing a button, does anyone else remember the early 80's when sticker shops were suddenly EVERYWHERE?  Usually in the sticker shop would be a machine that allowed you to create your own button.  So I had one that simply stated "I (heart) Bluebell"  because I loved my dog.  For whatever reason my bully, whose name I never knew, found this so poetic, ugly little girl loving her dog.  I was pathetic to her.  She would seek me out at recess every single day and tell me, over and over again 'You're pathetic, pathetic You are SO PATHETIC!"  I was maybe ten.  I'm 40 now and I still remember cowering, trying to avoid that mean little girl.  And to this day the word pathetic makes me shudder.
I told my mom about my bully and in typical mother fashion she brushed it off and said I bet that girl doesn't even know what pathetic means.  I knew even then that was a lie.  She knew what it meant she used it correctly, in her eyes I was miserably inadequate.  It is the word I use when I wish to make myself feel so small and so hopeless.
Why bring this clearly unpleasant memory to light?   Well the other night while happily pinteresting I stumbled upon a passage that got me thinking, and this afternoon suddenly those two thoughts came together.
“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 
How do the two relate?  Well when I first read the quote I was struck by the concept of being the tiny creature.  What if that is what people are?  The tiny creatures having to endure hell on earth in order to provide another race happy lives?  Would it change how I viewed my life if I found out in the end that I had provided hundreds, maybe millions of people or whatevers, a happy life?  Would it make a difference to me knowing my life has been a series of intentional tortures?  Not just accidents or bad choices but actual intentional sadistic practice?  Would I feel it was all worth it then?  Further more would it even matter?  I was still the one thing suffering so others could know joy.  It's kinda like that awful book The Giver .  Not everyone dislikes this book of course, but I sure as heck do.  Mostly because I've no idea why pretend they had done anything other than die there at the end?  Death is described to us so many times in so many different ways but regardless of how it's told some things are the same, a feeling of warmth, that everything is going to be okay, peace, sometimes lights and music.  So when a book ends like that you know the characters died.  From my perspective of course.  Perhaps I am too jaded, too pessimistic to know that sometimes a bright light and singing means salvation. 
Perhaps I am still that pathetic little girl hiding from a mean older child.  Some of us wear the kick me sign and some of us read the sign.  I have always been the wearer, my mom wasn't.  I'm not sure where I learned that I wasn't enough, if I was born knowing it or if it was something I learned after each brush off?  Sometimes I wish I could follow the breadcrumbs and find my way back to the source so that I might eradicate it.  Especially now days when I look at my son and realize he too is a wearer of the sign.  I don't want him to have the life I've had.  To forever feel as if you aren't good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, worthy enough.
How is confidence taught?  How is it learned?  Are some people just better at it?  Was there a line and I was busy in another part of the store to wait my turn for confidence?  Have I taught this victimization mentality to my son?  Is it too late to change it?  We have talked a lot about how children learn, my son and I.  Children learn a lot of things by modeling, they see it and they learn it.  If that's true then I did indeed do this to my son.  How do I undo it?  How do I teach him to be proud of who he is?  That he is enough, more than enough.  And that the only person who is more worthy of him is whomever he puts before himself.  Why have I put strangers before myself?
Following breadcrumbs...if we mimic what we see then perhaps my mom wasn't as confident as I thought she was.  Or maybe the source of her confidence is what I learned.  My mom always had a boyfriend when I was growing up.  She hated it being just me and her (proof that I wasn't enough, right?).  My mom was a very young mom, had me when she was 15, so, we kinda grew up together.  And she nearly always had a boyfriend, sometimes they lived with us, sometimes they overlapped, most times they never said goodbye to me when they left (further proof that I wasn't enough? not even important enough for a goodbye.)  So did I learn that men give you worth?  If they want you, then you're worth enough?  By that definition then me, who was always sure I wasn't enough, so I never developed the self esteem to see what I had to offer, and therefore hid in the shadows and watched from afar, too afraid to put myself out there to get a man...so me forever without boyfriends had no worth?
I never learned how to use sex as a weapon or as a power.  I always gave it fairly freely, though I didn't start giving until I was 18.  I woulda given a lot sooner if the object of my desire had desired me back.  I don't believe I have ever mistook sex for love, I know those are not the same thing, but I did mistake sex for attraction.  I think I had a total of three boyfriends before I was 18.  That's how awkward I was, no wait, four, I forgot one!   I digress, back to confidence and the teaching of it.
At school there is a woman, who has a child in the same grade as mine, in fact she is probably my age, the mother.  And we are as different as night and day.  She carries around with her an air of entitlement, while I am not.  Her daughter carries that air around with her as well.  Though I think it's actually and error not air.  The mother is a bitch, she has gone around me to get what she wants, bullied children and ridiculed them in front of their peers, thereby signaling that to other children that it is okay to bully this child.  Monkey See, Monkey Do.  I think her confidence is an ugly thing, because of it's size, but I envy it too, wanting just a small piece of that for myself.  So that I might pass it along to my son.  Confident men are sexy, I want my son to grow up with the confidence to attract a mate.
How is it taught?  How is it learned?  How do I acquire it for myself so that I may model it for my son?  Help?