I started crying because I think of the recent moments when people showed me that they like me or want to spend time with me, and it's absolutely incomprehensible to me that anyone would ever like me or love me. I don't feel like I deserve love, I think I'm a bad person, a burden and just worthless. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, I just feel like people are wasting time on me. I think there are better people out there that would provide more benefit to their lives. I don't understand why I have best friends who I'm in contact with daily, I don't understand why my mom still thinks about me and my needs sometimes and why in the world my family would miss my presence at a Christmas eve dinner (I decided to stay alone at home). People tell me they like me, but my brain just cannot comprehend that information.. that might be the worst part of it all. I just get anxious and feel the need to "escape" the situation, isolate etc. I don't know if I'll ever be able to truly trust and believe someone when they tell me they love me.
So I think the main issue here is there are two interpretations of signals in life, as we grow up. One is a genuine signal that we are unworthy. So, maybe you looked at someone, and smiled, and they showed a negative reaction to you, as if to signal "You are unworthy". Let's just grant that.
The second kind, is a kind of confusion, which we interpret as this signal. So suppose someone has horrific anxiety, and you look at them, smile, and they look away, but you *interpret* this as the first signal. If you could ask them, to clear things up, they would probably say , "No no, I don't think you're unworthy at all! It's actually me, It's me who can't connect, it's my fault! I'm sorry!". But this clarification never comes about, so the conclusion is again, "I am unworthy". Okay?
Now all of our lives, we are internalizing these signals. We are taking in these representations the world has of us, and saying, "Yes, okay, this *is* us-- this is what I am-- an unworthy person".
On top of this, we may be judging ourselves, with pathological guilt, shame, regret, unhappiness about who/what we are. Anxiety about what we'll fail to do based on past struggles.
All of this compounds and becomes a representation of your "self".
But so much of this is actually confused. Because for one, you didn't make any of this. For two, a lot of it is judgements from people who have shitty values, since those values come from just arbitrary evolution and not from some source of ethical insights. So for example, suppose there's a "conventionally ugly" person, and they want human connection, they see someone coming, a stranger-- they hopefully look to see if there's some validation. But no, it's rejection. Once again, " I am unworthy" is the message, it is taken in as reality, but it's a false reality because it has no basis in anything truly concrete. It would be like aliens from another planet saying "Yuck, look! That one has a head, two arms, and legs, how disgusting! That's not what *we* like, our preferences are the correct ones!" <-- absurd, yes? So if this is absurd , then the same kind of arbitrary human preferences, must also be absurd.
All of this may make sense now, but we still get lost in these human narratives which act like bugs in our brain.
What I'm trying to say is: You're nowhere near unworthy, it's all just random bullshit with no meaning, it's a nonsense story you've been convinced of. Every being, just by being alive, ought to have goodness come to them, whatever that is. That's just what goodness is, it's the intention to want good things for things that can experience good. And you're included in that, since everyone is. It's just that we don't live in the world which really cares about that kind of concept, we live in a world closer to the kind of confusion of the superficial and antisocial aliens in the example above.
