.......................
...ideally one that was both genuine and that you had the confidence and self awareness to interpret as kind. And for bonus points, what's one you've given?
I'm thinking back to the guy in group therapy years ago who told me he always thought of people who swore as not knowing any better words, but that I obviously knew better words and just also swore and even used them artistically and that's just really stuck with me. Sometimes I wonder how much of my self esteem has suffered not just because I've been told not to brag, but also because I'm extremely weird so the compliments I do receive often reflect that.
My bonus one (and I'm not sure how well he was able to take it) was that one of my fellow psych nurses was frequently and obviously terrified any time shit hit the fan, but that somehow still he'd never once failed to have my back. He'd be stuttering the whole way through an incident but I'd walk out of the med room with both halves of a B52 and he'd take one of the syringes without a second thought. He was literally the epitome of "courage isn't not being scared, it's being willing to face it." I should find a nice presentation of that quote somewhere to send him because I'm not sure I phrased it well at the time.
"Courage means being scared but doing it anyway" seems like a pretty succinct way of putting it I think.
My wierd compliment (if it can be called that) was when I was in high school English class. My teacher noticed how competent I was and how I was the only one to consistently raise my hand when he asked a question. He gave us a research paper to do and I got an F on it, exclusively because I fucked up the citations. He said the content was good, but he had to mark me way down due to improper citing. He said "I know you can do better than this."
Is that a complement? Either way, I think about that interaction and scenario a lot even though I haven't been in high school for well over a decade.