stop believing your brain when it says bad things about my friends (you, you are my friends)
So last year, I started writing this post, which as per usual I got 85% of the way through and then stalled out on because it started becoming way too many things. I actually only posted it tonight, although it's dated the day I started writing it. One of the reasons I was able to finally post it is that I decided that there was a significant chunk of it that I had added today that was trying to derail the topic, so I cut that section to fill it out more here.
I am fortunate to have met a lot of people who I consider friends, across several different groups. Whether you know it or not, you have already accomplished so much, done so much healing and growing and creating, and become really awesome people, but many of you still feel insecure or like you aren't or can't be enough. And I try to reassure you when I can, but I can tell you don't always believe me.
But I get it, I've been there too. It's that part of your brain that goes "she's just being nice but she doesn't know that I'm 'really' not enough" or whatever. They call it "imposter syndrome" but imo that's an incomplete term for this feeling of utter lack and desperate emptiness, of your very awareness of your own potential and past accomplishments and goals twisted into desolation and vertigo when you look at what you feel is the vast gap between who you are and who you were told—or who told yourself—you wanted to be.
"Is it irrational, to want to be so much, to want so hard it hurts?"—Miles Vorkosigan ("Memory", by Lois McMaster Bujold)
This feeling of want, both in the sense of desire and in the sense of lack, isn't at all irrational, or at least it's not abnormal. And honestly, I can't even say whether it's right or wrong. I don't look at it in that way. What it really comes down to though, is turning that feeling around and looking it square in the face, and figuring out whether this feeling is going to help you become the person you truly want to be…or not. It doesn't seem that simple, but it is. Maybe when we were younger, we allowed fear of guilt or shame to propel us forward when we had nothing else of ourselves. Maybe those fears weren't enough. What I do know is:
- Just because fear or shame or self-hatred worked before, that doesn't make it the only fuel you can run on now.
- If fear or shame or self-hatred didn't work before, it's even less likely to work now.
- Hating yourself hurts others. I know it doesn't feel like it. I know a lot of times people hate themselves because they think, in some way, that it's almost like they're doing a service to others to do so. That's not true. If you have the right people around you, they don't want to see you put yourself down, they want everyone to be lifted up, including you. I'm not saying this because I want people to feel guilty about feeling bad about themselves (see above), but to say that I remember a time in my life when I tried to justify hating myself by telling myself it was better for others, and I could not have been more wrong. Not only is it normal for other people to feel bad when you feel bad, but also, when you try to uplift others while having nothing but judgment for yourself, it doesn't make other people feel very good. At worst it feels insincere, and at best it feels awful to watch a friend tear themselves apart for no reason.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking from a pedestal of having become a perfect self-loving paragon or whatever. I have a ton of personal issues that I'm still working on when it comes to how I view myself, not least of which is a pretty hefty load of RSD that I don't often mention because a lot of times even I don't know what I need to feel better about it.
If I seem confident in my friendships or relationships, it's because I've worked long and hard to be able to recognize an RSD attack coming on and to hold those feelings at arm's length, to not let RSD whisper in my brain until it turns itself into a self-fulfilling prophecy by making me mistrust, disbelieve, and/or mistreat people I care about and who care about me.
Of course, it helps a lot that I think my friend circles are ones where if people didn't want me there, I wouldn't be there, and that I think I can trust them to let me know if I've done something wrong. And one of the ways I've made friends who I can trust like that is to show them I care about them, and to believe them when they gas me up and when they say they want the best for me. You can't build community by tearing people down, and that includes yourself.
I'm not writing this post to brag about myself or whatever. And I don't want to make anyone feel bad about feeling bad about themselves. But, if you also grew up hating yourself, if it feels wrong not to, all I want to say is that you don't have to keep doing that. I'm not saying that it's easy, just that it's possible. Maybe, for whatever reason, you think you can't get past that or don't see how to get past it. Maybe there are valid things you need to work on in order to control not your emotions, but how you receive them and respond to them, so you can be a better person for yourself and for others. Maybe you will never be perfect, but you can always be better than you were the day before. The point is to try, and to believe that you are capable of getting to a better place. Maybe not soon, but someday. Because I believe that you deserve to stop hating yourself.
And if you're reading this and thinking, "well she's talking about her other friends, she's not talking about me":