You are not uniquely bad. You aren’t evil, cursed, doomed to fail, deserving of suffering, or whatever other belief you’ve internalized that makes you see yourself as being less deserving of enjoying your life than other people.
Maybe you think you’ve done worse at life than other people, or that you inherently hurt people by existing. Maybe you think you’re a walking mistake.
Everyone alive has fucked up catastrophically and hurt people, sometimes irreparably. I’ll admit to being responsible for the implosion of a whole social group at one point because I stuck to my beliefs and those beliefs turned out to hurt people. Do I feel guilt for that? Yeah. I’m not alone there. Most of us do feel ashamed or guilty for something we’ve done. We all have something that haunts us at night.
Let me repeat that. You are not alone in having made mistakes. You have not fucked up more or worse than everyone else in existence. A thousand years ago, some human probably slipped up and insulted someone without meaning to just like you have. Someone dropped the dishes and broke them on the floor, and they got yelled at for it too. Someone looked a little too hard at the wrong person without realizing they’d think it was rude. Someone went to jail because of a rash decision they wish they hadn’t made.
It’s not always about mistakes, though, is it? Sometimes the problem is what you are. You’re queer in the wrong place with the wrong people. You use words that others don’t like, or you fail to use words when someone expects you to. Others hurt you for being yourself, so you learned that you were somehow bad enough to deserve it.
When others lash out at us on a regular basis, it can be easier to cope with that hurt by assuming that you did something to deserve their anger, especially if the people hurting you are people you’re stuck with: caregivers, bosses, friends, and so on. Logically, if it was your fault, then you can do something to avoid their rage. You can change. If you change enough, then they’ll like you, and people don’t hurt their friends on purpose. Right?
Right?
Some people do hurt their friends on purpose. Some people think that love is shown through pain and hate. All the change in the world won’t please these people. Their reactions to your existence are not your fault, and you do not control them. You do control whether you want to believe them when they say you are wrong for existing as yourself.
Other people’s reactions to your behavior are not under your control; the only thing you control is your own reaction to your own behavior, whether you tried to act kindly, how you treat yourself and others. You are not helpless. You can always choose to try to treat yourself with the patience and care that you deserved to receive from others.
Even if you don’t believe it, you deserve to be alive and happy simply because you exist. If you’re not literally committing a genocide or something very obviously and intentionally harmful on that scale, then you are no worse than any other average person. You’re just trying to live.
“You’re not the main character” also applies to thinking that you’re so uniquely horrible that everyone you meet is deeply invested in judging and hating you. That’s just as much of a cognitive distortion as believing that you’re the center of everyone’s admiration. I promise you that other people got their own lives to live and their own struggles and flaws to cope with.
compassionatereminders, Tumblr, 2023
One day I said out loud, “when we’re apart I think you must hate me, I picture you seeing my name when I text you and heaving this big sigh because I’m so annoying” and he quietly said “that’s a little mean. I wish you wouldn’t picture me that way” and something clicked.
I realized later that I’d been so caught up in insisting that I am too damaged and misshapen to love, justifying any perceived failure to love me as not only natural but righteous, that I never considered how it feels to love someone who refuses to take you for your word.
sung (killdads), Twitter, 2021
See also: Helplessness, Inner Critic