>


I have ADHD, low self esteem and bunch of other issues as well. I need perspective from you guys on self esteem part. 

Me too! It ain't easy.

My psychologist asked me what will make me accept myself, to which I responded, career, money, healthy social and dating life and a life free from my anxiety issues.

Here's the bad news ... none of these things will make you accept yourself. I went out and got a career, I've done very well in it, I'm in the top 1% of income earners in the US, I've got loving romantic relationships and a big circle of supportive friends, and I still have ADHD, low self esteem, and chronic depression.
Your mind is great at coming up with excuses for the way that it functions -- at the end of the day, if your brain is predisposed toward depression and low self-image, the extrinsic factors make much less of a difference than you think they do: you get to choose between feeling like a failure, and feeling like a fraud.
Your psychologist is right -- you certainly should go for the career, the relationships, etc, but you need to treat the way you feel about yourself as an independent problem, and start working on it now ... not come up with reasons to work on it later, because I promise you, it'll still be there waiting for you.

I want to understand from you guys, what makes you accept yourself? What derives your self esteem/worth?

Try and cut the narrative. It's just a process that's gotten stuck on repeat. Set little, tangible, achievable goals for yourself:

not "have a great career" but "sign up for the next semester of school" or "apply for 5 jobs"
not "have a body everyone admires" but "go cycling this week" or "sign up for yoga", etc
not "have a wonderful circle of friends," but "sign up for a group activity and talk to at least one person" and so on

Try and build momentum, and disrupt the ongoing feelings of defeat with little, tangible victories. Believe me, it piles up, and especially if you have ADHD like me, getting into a habit is a huge thing.
This is one of the hardest things about mental health.
When I was poor and on my way to homelessness and saw no way out, I felt horrible. Years later, when I was rich and rising successfully in my career and was by all measures a pretty successful person, I...felt horrible. And I felt horrible in exactly the same way! The voice in my head said the same things, in the same language.
The thing about self-loathing and about anxiety is that it isn't the result of your circumstances, but it does justify itself by using your circumstances. So when I was poor, I hated myself "because" I couldn't afford groceries. And when I was doing well in my career, I hated myself "because" I fucked up at work. But more properly, I just hated myself, and was looking for justifications as to why that was. 
I was like a detective who has been told a murder occurred, looking for any data in the environment as to why the murder occurred. "Oh, I see, a broken twig, that must be where the murderer came from!" "Aha, a hammer, that must be the murder weapon!" And all of that made sense...except that no murder had actually occurred in the first place. I was fitting that data into the existing narrative, rather than questioning the narrative itself.

Now, that's not to say environment doesn't matter, just that it isn't one-to-one with how you feel. Yes, a better environment will probably help, and yes, your current environment might be hurting. But there are plenty of people in worse environments than you who are happy, and plenty of people in better environments than you who are miserable. That isn't to say "oh, just think positive", which (in that form) is not very good advice. It's to say that circumstances and how you feel are different things.
One of the best analogies I have for mental health is color. You remember that dress that set the internet on fire five or ten years ago? Where half the internet was absolutely convinced it was white and gold and the other half was absolutely convinced it was blue and black? Everyone was looking at the same image, but taking something totally different from it.
That's because color, like all perceptions, isn't a property of the world. It's a property of your mind. It is of course related to the world, but it's filtered through many layers of unconscious processing long before it gets to any direct awareness by you as a conscious being - layers that can tell you the dress is white and gold or that it's black and blue in a way that, unless you are really vigilant or can compare to the experiences of others, you'll never notice.
The same is going on right now. Your brain wants to interpret your world as black and blue, and it is serving up the world to your conscious mind in a form that is so obviously black and blue that you as a conscious being are going "well, duh, how could it be otherwise?". And your therapist is telling you well, actually that dress is white and gold, and you are going "um no that's fucking stupid it is obviously black".
What your therapist is trying to do here isn't to tell you you're being irrational. It's to tell you that your subconscious processing systems are broken in a way that is distorting the version of reality that can get into your brain. Those processing systems are looking for ways to interpret the world as proof that you're a bad person. And since most people are flawed, it isn't hard for them to find it.

So, to get back to your questions:

Honestly, I don't understand this, isn't this how it works? Don't we all tend to tie our self worth to our accomplishments etc or am just an idiot out there?

We do to some extent. And in particular, healthy people can do this, because their brain doesn't minimize their accomplishments and magnify their faults. When they look at a dress, they see its color as it is, more or less, and so they don't think the world has more of one color than another.
But even then, things are comparative, not absolute. A student at Harvard who gets worse grades than other Harvard students might feel bad about that, even though they are, objectively, still far smarter than the average person. Someone who wins Employee of the Month at their local McDonalds franchise might feel good, even though that's not a very high bar. (This is part of why self-esteem can be harder in the modern world: we are exposed much more to people more successful than ourselves, and much less to people who are less successful.)
Suppose you knew someone who had a severe disability. They can barely walk, or they're significantly less intelligent than the average person. Are they necessarily miserable, even though they objectively have much lower capability than others? Would you say they should dislike themselves for accomplishing less?

How are they gonna accept and love themselves because there's something wrong with the person which got them in such a position in the first place.

This is a very important point.
There is a difference between "I am sad" and "I deserve to be sad".
Right now, your miserable circumstances are more than just miserable circumstances. They are a cudgel with which you can beat yourself. They act as "proof" of your self-loathing, as concrete demonstrations of your "failures", because you're seeing those circumstances through the broken processing layers we were talking about a little while ago.
Part of the reason depression and anxiety are "sticky" is that they run on this loop. You feel bad, so you feel like you deserve to feel bad, so you beat yourself up more, so you sink further into depression, so you feel worse. And so on.
There is "something wrong with you" only in the sense that there is something wrong with someone who has a broken leg. It makes it harder for you to do certain things. But it isn't a moral failing on your part. You are sick, not bad. We don't call it "mental illness" for nothing: it is no more a failing of you as a person than getting the flu is.
When you get the flu, you might feel bad. You might roll around feeling miserable. Your head pounds, you throw up every couple hours, and it's just an awful time. But at no point while having the flu did you do anything wrong. You just felt bad. And you'd understand that your suffering is just a temporary thing that isn't under your direct control. Sure, you can do a few things to help it pass (drink plenty of water, get some sleep). But you can't choose not to have the flu. You don't hate yourself for having it. You don't feel like having the flu is some immutable part of what you are.
When your therapist says to love yourself, they don't mean "stop working on your problems". They mean "stop treating your problems as a way in which you, as a person, are bad, and start treating them as external problems to be solved".

Idk maybe I never felt loved and accepted

Yeah, me either. I still struggle with that bit. I still constantly feel not good enough. But I have learned not to listen to that feeling too much. And I've learned to remind myself that when I falter, I didn't falter because I'm a bad person, I faltered because life is hard and because I'm burdened with a difficult path in life. 
If I don't accomplish what I want to today, I'll feel sad, but I'll go "man, that sucked", curl up with a comforting book, cry a little, and go to sleep. And then I'll try again tomorrow. I can't not be depressed or anxious sometimes, because that's just how my brain works. But I can learn to cope with them and to navigate around them in ways that prevent them from establishing the debilitating loops in which I spent most of my life. >


You have to build up your own resilience and recognize that your worth is not in your achievements or "wins" it's in you as a person.

Your worth as a person is absolutely tied to achieving your goals, otherwise you feel like dead weight on society. Does being a good person pay bills? Does being a good person turn you into an athelete? Does being a good person get you into relationships? No. Hard work, skill, and determination get you those things, and if you lack any of that, how are you supposed to assign positive value to yourself?
I'm with OP where I no longer understand the concept of loving yourself, personally from going through multiple ego deaths. It genuinely seems strange and arrogant to me, especially if you have nothing to back it up with. >


Do you think a single mother is a dead weight? Or retired people? Or just people whose goals didn't work out?

Rearing the next generation is literally one of the biggest contributions one can make to society. Retired people have already paid their dues, and deserve to reap what they have sown. They also contribute knowledge and experience. And as somebody who has come short in just about every benchmark i set for myself, I do genuinely feel like i'm dead weight in the grand scheme of things.

If you're a cunt to work with, you wont be working very long.

Actually being a good person is not the same as having people skills. "Fake it 'till you make it" and what not.

Does being completely negative about yourself help motivate you to be better and train?

No, but complete assholes can better themselves physically as well, so that doesnt really matter imo.

Why would anyone want you if you were a "bad person"?

The fact that psychotic narcissists and literal violent felons can have people fall in live with them says otherwise.

How do you put all of that in without some positivity?

"I dislike myself because I suck. I do not enjoy disliking myself. Therefore, I will do these things that make me suck less so i dislike myself less" is how I convince myself to do things like work out and stay employed.
The fact that you exist is not praiseworthy in and of itself, as it is something that quite literally all of us are capable of. To me, that sounds like you're proud of yourself for being able to breathe, or that you can urinate. I understand that certain people cannot perform basic functions, but for them those small things are relatively impressive, and are absolutely something to be proud of. But fully capable people like us? It would be a very weird thing to brag about. It's what you do with the existence that you're given should be a point of pride and self-worth. >

No, I get the point, I just disagree with it. Self-love comes from being worthy of love yourself, a trait that is not inherent in every single human. The majority of people deserve it imo, but not all. >

If you're talking about loving yourself just for existing, then yes, I do not get the point. >


My psychologist asked me what will make me accept myself, to which I responded, career, money, healthy social and dating life and a life free from my anxiety issues.

Most people never achieve most or even half of these things. If you're making this the benchmark, you've set yourself up for failure.
A better question is to ask why you want each of these things and what they actually enable you to do in practice (not just desiring them because you think "this is what a put-together person has").
 You are emphasizing the external, which suggests to me you may be particularly concerned with how you are perceived or how you compare to other people. I'm not saying these things can be completely ignored, but they aren't anywhere near as more important as whether you are enjoying what you do on a day to day basis. Most people have to choose between money and a career they enjoy/aren't stressed out by (or find some middle ground). Most people are lucky to find one really good friend or partner. 
What you are not listing are specific practices that are enjoyable or meaningful to you. Do you have hobbies? Are there individuals you love? Are there issues you are passionate about? 
No one is keeping a scoreboard on how well you did at a, b, or c. What matters is making the most of your time (spoiler: few people are ever completely sure they're doing this, but you have some choice in the matter). If you feel you're doing the things you want ( within your power/circumstance) then self-esteem tends to come with it.