I am so frustrated. I feel that I cannot convey to people what problems I actually have.
I do have problems. I have a very serious and life-crushing mixture of depression and anxiety and obsessive-compulsion and executive dysfunction that I am desperate to fix.
And yet, nearly every conversation I have with a friend or family member or therapist always gets boiled down to:
"You have low self-esteem." "You should be kinder to yourself." "You need to put yourself first sometimes."
And I can't seem to put it into words that anyone else can understand-- but I am bone-deep certain that this is NOT the problem I have.
And I am bone-deep certain that the efforts to address this problem are doing nothing for me, and are distracting from the real problems.
And every day I'm getting closer to A FUCKING BREAKDOWN, because I am nowhere near figuring out what I ACTUALLY need, because everyone else is focusing on self-esteem...
I've been re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which in my childhood was probably my first experience with fictional "representation" of depression.
In one character. Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Who was played for laughs, mostly, and had pretty much no good experiences at all...
And who was also very unlike me.
Because, along with my mountain of emotional baggage, I'm also capable of being fun, enthusiastic, affectionate, loving, kind, respectful, empathetic, a ton of things Marvin isn't...
And yet, re-reading his scenes, I'm realizing his version of depression... resonates with me. Far more closely than ANY other portrayal of depression that I've ever seen anywhere.
For the single reason that he did NOT have low self-esteem.
At least, at no point in the whole story did I ever get the feeling that he did.
His view of himself, to me, always came across as... lofty. Superior. "Brain the size of a planet." In his view, he was the only creature who mattered. In any situation, no matter how much danger everyone else was in, his main concern was how miserable it was for him personally.
His view of others (humans, aliens, superintelligent shades of blue, gods, demons, other robots, sentient elevators) was always a hundred percent disdainful. They were all pathetic. None of them, with their tiny consciousness and their insignificant little worries, would ever be able to understand how truly horrid his own planet-sized misery was.
The descriptor "paranoid" was probably chosen just for the rhyme with "android." It doesn't fit him, really, since it evokes an idea of fear, and he is never afraid. Just grimly certain that everything's going to go wrong. Sure, he may be convinced everyone's out to get him. But he doesn't panic and scramble to protect himself... no, he just passive-aggressively groans that that's the way of this miserable world and he's going to have to suffer through it.
"Pessimistic" is a better adjective. Of course his expectations are perpetually low, because his opinion of everything in the world (apart from himself) is perpetually low.
He assumes all the other entities he encounters will hate him.
But-- critically-- NOT because he considers himself worthless.
Because he considers THEM worthless. Because he thinks THEY are incapable of forming an accurate opinion of him.
Unsurprising to him, yes. Expected. Inevitable. With such pathetic little brains, they can't help failing to recognize his greatness.
But still wrong, still another line on his endless list of things to disdain about everyone else.
Now.... in saying that I "relate to" a character like this, I'm aware that I have a hell of a lot of nuance to explain.
Of course, as I said above, I do not think I'm actually similar to this character in any more than a few, specific, narrow ways.
I do not disdain other people in general. I do not assume by default that their thoughts about me are wrong. I do not always expect the worst of them. I am not convinced that they will always hate me and never want to help me. And when I do fear their potential reactions to me, it is actual fear, not grim resignation.
But I do have these few, specific, narrow things in common with Marvin, which I'll try to enumerate here.
1. I have a high opinion of myself.
- I don't think my brain is the size of a planet, but I do think it's an unusually good brain, with a large variety of rare talents.
- I believe there is ample evidence of this. I believe that without this evidence, my view of myself would be basically a delusion of grandeur. It's very high. When I read about people who are considered great geniuses, both historically and currently, I often consider myself equal or better (although my specific talents are rarely in the exact same fields).
- I am often very, very frustrated when someone else gets more recognition than I do, for what I consider the same or lesser level of talent.
- When this happens, I usually conclude that the difference in the levels of success was due to the other person having 1. better luck and 2. better skills at other things peripheral to the talent, like self-promotion and marketing.
- (I do not think these factors "should" matter, and I find it frustrating and unfair that they do, but I understand the mechanisms whereby they can make a difference.)
- I do not believe that anyone's success is achieved solely through "free will." I believe every choice that a person makes is because of what they want, and people cannot decide what to want.
- So even if a skill was built through years of hard work, no one can just decide to be (or not be) the sort of person who would choose to put that amount of work into that skill.
- And regardless of choices, hundreds of factors totally outside your control can affect what you even get the opportunity to do.
- So really, I believe success is pretty much 100% luck if you trace the cause-and-effect chains back far enough.
- I believe that the same is true for me, whenever my own success is greater than other people's. What I accomplish is the result of luck, too. The skills I have are results of luck: good luck that caused me, in whatever way, to be interested in those things AND to have the opportunity to practice them.
- I neither blame myself for my failures nor congratulate myself for my successes. I'm happy when I've succeeded, and sad when I've failed, but I don't waste time on hypothetical other outcomes where different choices could have had different results... because this is how it did happen, and it doesn't matter now.
- Any thoughts about what I "could have done differently" are focused on the possibility of similar future situations, and how I might be able to apply the things I've learned from this one.
- Basically:
I think I am a very good, intelligent, and talented person.
I may sometimes be unhappy about things my past self did, BUT I think all of my past decisions were the best they could possibly have been for the person I was at the time.
I understand, to some degree, based on the workings of the world and the workings of my mind in the past and present, why I have not achieved as much as I want to.
And I don't lay the blame on myself ...but I do get extremely frustrated thinking about it.
2. I do, often, focus more on the negative than the positive.
- Not in a miserable, hopeless way, usually. Just in a common, human way... born of the evolutionary fact that survival depends on our brains identifying problems that need solutions, not identifying happy truths that require no change.
- I don't exactly choose to have this focus. It's just what comes naturally to me.
- But I am aware of a certain sense of safety in it. If my expectations are grim, I am more prepared for possible adversity, and I'm more likely to be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.
3. And yes, often this focus on the negative means I end up concluding that other people are unlikely to appreciate how great a person I am.
- Well, it's more complicated than that, actually.
- I have very complex, contradictory feelings and expectations about other people's appreciation of me.
- This is probably part of the root of my problems, in some way or another.
- Part of me expects that anything I'm proud of doing will be immediately admired by everyone else who sees it. For instance, if I post a clever thing online, I actually do often expect the best, instead of the worst.
- My opinion of my idea is so high, in these moments, that I'm sure I'm going to get a ton of comments and shares and likes... and then I feel angry and disappointed if that doesn't happen.
- In these moments of anger and disappointment, I mostly feel frustrated with "the system," for example the social media algorithm that I suspect didn't show my post to enough people, who, of course, would have liked it if they saw it. (In those moments I'm not quite capable of believing that anyone else could genuinely not like what I created.)
- If I do get a post that goes semi-viral, or a good review on one of my books, or a lot of admiration of the wares I'm selling at a local craft fair, or some other recognition for my talent... I respond to it a bit like an addictive drug.
- The initial feeling will be satisfaction, contentment: a feeling of "Yes, finally! This is the right way for people to treat me. They're properly recognizing how great I am. I'm pleased with this."
- It will feel deserved and needed, but also long-awaited-- like eating good food after being hungry a long time.
- My mood will get happy, giddy, bouncy. My replies to people will be cheerful, friendly, appreciative.
- But there will be an addiction-like craving for more. If a certain level of recognition continues long enough, I'll begin perceiving it as the baseline, getting no more pleasure from it, and feeling satisfied ONLY when there are spikes of attention that go above that baseline.
- For instance, if my viral tweet is getting Likes every minute and Retweets every hour, they stop being enough, and I only get the spike of happiness if I see an actual admiring comment.
- Then, when the engagement goes down, my mood will crash. Either I manage to get myself out of the situation where I'm desperately waiting for more praise, or I'll just stay there, getting more and more frustrated and disappointed.
- Sometimes I'll make further attempts to do praiseworthy things, and the attempts look more and more like desperation.
- I think this was part of why, as a teen and young adult, I had so many episodes of absurd hyperactive behavior whenever I was in a social setting. Once I'd tasted the satisfaction of impressing others with a clever insight or a funny joke, I would keep trying to recapture that feeling, and my "jokes" would become more and more bizarre as I got more desperate for the next hit of recognition, eventually spiraling away from my self-control.
- Part of the contradiction in my feelings is that I do feel a visceral sense of "injustice" or "unfairness" or "I deserve better" when I'm not getting praise and recognition...
- and yet I don't, really, believe in the concept of "deserving."
- I believe there are needs and wants that should always be satisfied as much as possible for as many people as possible... not because they deserve it, but because it increases their happiness, and striving for the greatest happiness of the most people is... well, it's not perfect, but it's the closest thing I can imagine to a definition of "good."
- I think, in a better world, there would be basic rights that no one would have to earn by succeeding at anything. There wouldn't be discussions of whether they deserved it. These would include all things necessary for survival (and no one would have to earn them by proving they couldn't work for them, either).
- Work would be for making extra money, for luxuries. Employers would have to make sure the jobs they offered were tolerable enough that people would choose to do them without the threat of starvation otherwise.
- Punishments would also never be given on the basis of someone deserving them. They'd be designed with the goal of deterring crime and, when possible, rehabilitating criminals and removing any reason they'd commit further crimes.
- I know there are tons of gaps in this sort of plan, and tons of ways that, even within such a system, not everyone would be safe or happy. But I think we could have a lot more people safe and happy than we have now.
- And I think part of the reason our society won't accept anything like this, even though it could make nearly everyone's life better, is because too many people still believe in the concept of "deserve," and would rather be unhappy than see other people be happy who don't "deserve" to.
-Anyway, to bring this back to my own feeling of "deserving better"... I think it could also be described as a feeling of... "unsatisfied needs, in a society where others have the same needs satisfied, supposedly as a reward for their success at doing something... which I believe I've succeeded at too, equally or better, and yet I am not getting my own needs satisfied."
- I guess I can believe in "fairness and unfairness" without believing in "deserving." I think that in a fair world, almost all of us could get what we want. But when the world tells us that getting things is dependent on what we do... and yet I see others doing less and getting more... that triggers a very deep sense of "unfair."
- But I'm also aware of my hedonic treadmill. I know that even when I do get things that make me happy, my threshold for happiness just grows. I know that if I found a way of increasing the amount of attention I get for my creative work, that would not, in itself, cause me to be sustainably happy.
Still, I do think there are things I could do in my life that would increase my overall amount of long-term happiness.
Most of my difficulty happens when I'm pursuing such things.
The "low self-esteem" idea keeps coming up whenever I talk about how intensely uncomfortable I can be with the idea of standing up for myself, asking for things I want and need.
"You go to so much trouble to avoid doing anything you think might upset someone else."
"Yeah, that's a fear that I am trying to..."
"Why do you never put yourself first? Don't you think you deserve that? Can't you be kind to yourself?"
And I explain that I DO want things for myself -- want them desperately, because I SHOULD HAVE THEM -- and what's holding me back is NEVER any sense of not-deserving.
It's just this intense, overwhelming fear of conflict.
When I ask for something --or when someone else asks me for something --THAT'S when my emotions begin to react as if I'm expecting the absolute worst from everyone else.
Asking for something, no matter how much I need it... or refusing someone else's request, no matter how outrageous it is... those are two of the absolute hardest things for me to do.
They generate outright panic.
I will resign myself to many highly unpleasant things before I'll even consider either of those.
Often I don't even know WHAT I'm afraid that others will do or say-- but even so, it's a fear strong enough to outweigh any of my desires for good things.
I want so very, very badly to find out how to overcome this fear.
I know it isn't rational.
I know it's in the way of lots of things that I need and want.
Things I SHOULD HAVE, because I am JUST as good as the people who already have them. Or better.
It's not FAIR. I am FURIOUS that I can't overcome it yet.
But always, always, therapists keep telling me that overcoming this fear has to begin with... caring more about myself.
But I do care about myself. Plenty.
I don't think I could care any MORE about myself without becoming some megalomaniac supervillain.
I am absolutely certain that's NOT WHERE THE PROBLEM IS.
AND I CAN'T FIX THE PROBLEM, EVEN THOUGH IT'S KILLING ME, BECAUSE NO ONE WILL HELP ME LOOK WHERE IT ACTUALLY MIGHT BE.
Only keep looking in the one place I AM SURE it's not.
Over and over again.
Fuck.
It feels like I'm living in some weird dystopia where all the ice cream is kept behind razor wire, guarded by six jaguars, at the peak of a thousand-foot-high, freezing mountaintop.
"Why don't you enjoy yourself and have some ice cream?"
"It's behind razor wire. And jaguars. On a mountain."
"But if you can just get past that, you can have ice cream! Don't you like ice cream? Don't you think you deserve it?"
"I LOVE ice cream. I love it so much I never even feel guilty about eating it. I'd never EVER deny myself ice cream because of some weird desire to punish myself."
"But you ARE denying it to yourself! What are you punishing yourself for?"
"Are you listening? I'm saying that my love for ice cream is not as strong as my dislike for... climbing up mountains. And climbing over razor wire. And fighting jaguars."
"But it's your right to take a break and enjoy some ice cream! That's more important than some jaguars wanting to keep you out. They've got no right to do that! You've got to stand up to them. Why can't you put YOURSELF first, for once? Why do you hate yourself so much?"
"They... have claws. And teeth. And also there's razor wire..."
I don't even know. I say all this, but no one listens. They act like they heard something totally different.
I think it stems from people-- even therapists-- not being able to imagine what it feels like to have the fears I have. They can't imagine it, so they just don't believe me, or something.
And so instead of trying to work on the fear, they just... act like it isn't there, and turn to something else that they think ought to be the problem instead.
I don't even know.
The thing is... I am ENTIRELY AWARE that, even within that ice cream metaphor, it's likely that the danger isn't real.
Maybe I'm imagining everything I fear.
Maybe the jaguars are really just cuddly kittens. Maybe the razor wire is really a blanket fort, and it's not on a mountain at all, it's by a fireplace in a cozy living room somewhere.
Maybe getting ice cream is actually the easiest thing in the world.
Maybe I just need to learn how to overcome fear just enough to see everything the way it really is... instead of the way my fears make it look.
But I cannot possibly IMAGINE how this process should start with... "deciding to be kind to myself."
Isn't that what I'm doing already?
Going just by what I'm able to perceive, what seems real to me right now... the razor wire and the jaguars, and the pain that would far outweigh any pleasure I could get from ice cream...
...isn't staying AWAY from that mountain the ABSOLUTE KINDEST thing I could POSSIBLY be doing for myself?
Wouldn't learning to face my fears have to start with.... learning to be LESS worried about my own comfort and happiness?
In other words, LESS kind to myself?
Why the fuck can't people understand? I am TRYING to share what I'm actually going through. I am TRYING SO HARD to open up my inner world to others. I am SCREAMING my truth at them-- and they still act like it can't be the real truth.
WHY? WHY CAN'T IT?
Where the fuck are they getting this fixed idea of what's inside my brain?
This idea that's so stuck in their heads that it crowds out EVERYTHING I SAY about MY OWN experience, no matter how loudly and clearly, no matter how much evidence I have for it?
I'm so fucking lonely.