Full offense, but some folks look at Yuuri and go “I diagnose you with poor self-esteem,” and then write that as the whole of his character rather than simply a part of it, a part that every single normal human on earth shares and struggles with to varying degrees, especially in your teens and early 20s which are a generally pretty shit time.
Self-doubt is a normal human emotion that everyone should experience from time to time. A person who is always 100% self-assured and absolutely confident in their abilities and actions all the time is probably a fucking psychopath. Most people have to build confidence through experience. You ever start a new job and feel like a total fraud but then like six month or so, maybe a year in you realize that actually, you did learn all that stuff and you can handle this, because you have been handling it? Do that a few times and it gets easier each time because confidence is like a muscle, you have to train it.
Yuuri has anxiety and that can ramp up negative emotions and increase their frequency, but if he was half the basket case some folks write him as, he’d never have made it so far in competitive figure skating. One of the benefits age gives you is the ability to understand that your teens and early 20s are an objectively terrible life stage, finishing that prefrontal cortex development is hard! I harp on this all the time, but it’s really important to remember that we, the audience, meet Yuuri at one of the lowest points of his life, marked by personal loss and professional failure. He’s 23, so already Going Through It by nature, and he’s homesick and under a lot of pressure between college and competitive figure skating, two things well known to be hard on one’s mental health. He’s achieved a new success (making it to the GPF), which is a double-edged sword because he made it but he also hasn’t done it before so he has no frame of reference for this experience to rely on. And then his dog dies and he wipes out and his hero doesn’t even recognize him despite him being one of only six competitors (whether or not Viktor actually didn’t recognize him or he was just trying to be polite can be endlessly debated, but in any case Yuuri interpreted it that way, and that’s what matters in terms of his mental/emotional state).
So yeah. Objectively a rough time! And a little figure skating twist on something a lot of early-20-something’s go through, finishing college and losing a childhood pet and career disappointment and moving back in with your parents. Young adulthood can really shake whatever confidence you had before.
But again as I’ve said before, Yuuri is also picking himself back up, he’s already decided to start training again and give it another try before Viktor even shows up. It literally isn’t until Viktor plays along about going back to Russia with Yurio (I don’t blame him for this, his arrival did not go as he expected and it’s understandable he’d want some assurance that Yuuri actually wants him there) that Yuuri’s narrative takes a sharp turn to the negative. Yuuri is not weak or delicate, and while he’s sometimes prone to self-pity, it’s really important that he doesn’t get stuck in it. He has streaks of cockiness and bitchiness (my favorite aspects of him if I’m being honest) and he is so impulsive he even surprises himself sometimes. He’s funny and driven and actually very good at his chosen profession. Phichit says he’s fun, and Phichit seems like a fun kind of guy himself so I believe him and would love to know what kind of shenanigans those two got up to in Detroit. Yuuri is interesting and I really think that someday, with a few more years of experience, and a fully-developed brain, and the influence of Viktor’s high regard for him, Yuuri is going to find that lacking confidence is a sometimes feeling that comes less frequently with age.
(And again, he starts the show already 6th in the world! They outright say right at the beginning that his poor performance was uncharacteristic! He’s extremely good at a very difficult thing, and he simply would not have succeeded even that far if he were constantly engaged in self-pitying navel gazing!)
