anhed0nia
Member
- Jun 17, 2023
- 31
Hello Sasu,
This is a little bit of an introduction, and a reflection on experiences other people might relate to. First of all, I'm so glad to have found myself here. It's the only place I can turn when I'm at my lowest, where I can speak honestly without fear of criticism or, god forbid, some sort of intervention. I think that if any outsider really spent time in these forums, they wouldn't judge this community so harshly. I'm always amazed by the way people treat each other here, with kindness and imagination for the suffering of others; we may not all share the exactly same feelings and experiences, but no one is denied their right to assess their own quality of life. That is very beautiful to me.
I have had suicidal thoughts since early childhood, more or less from the time I understood what suicide was. My parents took me to a child psychologist at some point, but no one explained to me what was going on; I sat there silently as my parents unloaded a laundry list of my undesirable behaviors over my head, thinking that I must have been such a bad kid that my own parents had to tell on me to another adult. Nothing came of it and it never happened again. Since then I've been pretty consistently treated as if any problems I have are just my own fault, the result of "being negative" and not making an effort. In reality I feel like I'm trying so hard to improve myself, all the time, that I'm about to lose my mind, but I'm never able to achieve much of anything--actually I usually wind up making a huge, embarrassing mess that inconveniences other people--so I'm right back to being accused of just being lazy and defeatist, with no way to defend myself.
Actually I fail at and ruin things with such consistency that when I tell the truth about what I go through, no one believes me. Part of me thinks this might be a very American problem: You're supposed to always insist that everyone can do anything they put their minds to, even if there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. I know that people are trying to do me some kind of favor when I explain my latest hardships and they say, you know, "You're not stupid, you're not bad at things, you're just being too hard on yourself, you only did it wrong because you stressed yourself out, that thing wasn't your fault, that was a coincidence, that's on somebody else, et al ad nauseum." And like, that stuff would be easier to swallow if I just screwed up once in a blue moon, but the truth is that every day is the same. If I'm such a stellar person, why do I need this entire battery of excuses to explain what happens to and because of me every single day? The message I get from that is that my real-life stupidity and incompetence is so extreme that the average person finds it literally unbelievable. My situation is so bad that people assume I'm just making it up, and they're happy to feed that back to me, and it's obvious that none of them get how incredibly confusing and disturbing that is. Not to overuse an overused term, but it's really like a form of gaslighting. It's like everybody has some version of me in their heads that's so far away from my daily experience that I can't even imagine it--some alternate universe Me who is capable of attractive and intelligent and talented, someone I've never met who is apparently living an amazing life in some other part of the world. And meanwhile I always feel like saying to these well-meaning people, "If you really cared about me, you would listen to me and believe me. You would say that you're sorry about my troubles, and that what I'm going through sounds really hard. That would be more than enough for me. But hearing instead that I'm secretly a terrific and effective person is the same as being told 'You're beautiful in your own way'; it's like being told you have a million dollars in the bank, but you're just not able to spend it on anything for some mysterious reason.'"
It drives me completely crazy that low self-esteem is considered to be some sort of delusion or disorder. There is no inherent moral quality in the idea of self-esteem, it's literally just an estimate of yourself. There are plenty of people with high self-esteem who are just monsters. If I have low self-esteem, that's just the result of my most rational evaluation of my own worth, according to my own values. What's so wrong with that? If I hate myself, why can't people give me enough credit to think that I must have considered this thoughtfully and come up with my reasons? I'm sure that this common unwillingness to let people judge their own quality of life, and this insistence that everyone love and admire themselves no matter what, is at the heart of a lot of prejudice against suicidal individuals.
This is a little bit of an introduction, and a reflection on experiences other people might relate to. First of all, I'm so glad to have found myself here. It's the only place I can turn when I'm at my lowest, where I can speak honestly without fear of criticism or, god forbid, some sort of intervention. I think that if any outsider really spent time in these forums, they wouldn't judge this community so harshly. I'm always amazed by the way people treat each other here, with kindness and imagination for the suffering of others; we may not all share the exactly same feelings and experiences, but no one is denied their right to assess their own quality of life. That is very beautiful to me.
I have had suicidal thoughts since early childhood, more or less from the time I understood what suicide was. My parents took me to a child psychologist at some point, but no one explained to me what was going on; I sat there silently as my parents unloaded a laundry list of my undesirable behaviors over my head, thinking that I must have been such a bad kid that my own parents had to tell on me to another adult. Nothing came of it and it never happened again. Since then I've been pretty consistently treated as if any problems I have are just my own fault, the result of "being negative" and not making an effort. In reality I feel like I'm trying so hard to improve myself, all the time, that I'm about to lose my mind, but I'm never able to achieve much of anything--actually I usually wind up making a huge, embarrassing mess that inconveniences other people--so I'm right back to being accused of just being lazy and defeatist, with no way to defend myself.
Actually I fail at and ruin things with such consistency that when I tell the truth about what I go through, no one believes me. Part of me thinks this might be a very American problem: You're supposed to always insist that everyone can do anything they put their minds to, even if there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. I know that people are trying to do me some kind of favor when I explain my latest hardships and they say, you know, "You're not stupid, you're not bad at things, you're just being too hard on yourself, you only did it wrong because you stressed yourself out, that thing wasn't your fault, that was a coincidence, that's on somebody else, et al ad nauseum." And like, that stuff would be easier to swallow if I just screwed up once in a blue moon, but the truth is that every day is the same. If I'm such a stellar person, why do I need this entire battery of excuses to explain what happens to and because of me every single day? The message I get from that is that my real-life stupidity and incompetence is so extreme that the average person finds it literally unbelievable. My situation is so bad that people assume I'm just making it up, and they're happy to feed that back to me, and it's obvious that none of them get how incredibly confusing and disturbing that is. Not to overuse an overused term, but it's really like a form of gaslighting. It's like everybody has some version of me in their heads that's so far away from my daily experience that I can't even imagine it--some alternate universe Me who is capable of attractive and intelligent and talented, someone I've never met who is apparently living an amazing life in some other part of the world. And meanwhile I always feel like saying to these well-meaning people, "If you really cared about me, you would listen to me and believe me. You would say that you're sorry about my troubles, and that what I'm going through sounds really hard. That would be more than enough for me. But hearing instead that I'm secretly a terrific and effective person is the same as being told 'You're beautiful in your own way'; it's like being told you have a million dollars in the bank, but you're just not able to spend it on anything for some mysterious reason.'"
It drives me completely crazy that low self-esteem is considered to be some sort of delusion or disorder. There is no inherent moral quality in the idea of self-esteem, it's literally just an estimate of yourself. There are plenty of people with high self-esteem who are just monsters. If I have low self-esteem, that's just the result of my most rational evaluation of my own worth, according to my own values. What's so wrong with that? If I hate myself, why can't people give me enough credit to think that I must have considered this thoughtfully and come up with my reasons? I'm sure that this common unwillingness to let people judge their own quality of life, and this insistence that everyone love and admire themselves no matter what, is at the heart of a lot of prejudice against suicidal individuals.
