Okay. I’m going to try to be a little bit nicer to myself. I guess being constantly hard on myself is almost a kind of badly thought-out defense mechanism? It’s like shouting INB4 YOUR CRITICISMS if I criticize myself first.
I can easily take constructive criticism on things I’ve worked on or whatever. But certain people
-coughmomcough-go straight to attacks on my person when I screw up (generally along the lines of “you’re lazy/self-centered/give up too easily”), which I find harder to let slide off.And instead of looking at my negative traits and trying to improve on them, I just assume they’re intrinsic and disabling and dwell on them. This serves a dual purpose: One, starting with the basic assumption that I am awful makes it harder to be disappointed and lets me reign in perfectionist tendencies. And, perhaps, two, an attempt at modesty and self-monitoring because I know I’m—pardon—quite intelligent and moderately talented and don’t want to be called arrogant (or miss something because I actually am arrogant).
Self-sabotage is one of my biggest problems.
Putting myself down all the time creates a bigger handicap than my actual personality. But since I logically know I’m not really helping myself and probably making it worse, I’ll try to stop. At least a little.
(I still feel like everything I say sounds arrogant in some way and naive and if it actually is, gah, I’m sorry, but I really can’t watch it all the time without beating myself up.)
…In completely unrelated news, I learned that one of my roommates is a German major.
Sweet.
ITOTALLYLEARNEDTHISINCLASSZOMG….Right, sorry, what I mean is that the manner in which your mother expresses her displeasure with your actions is such that it creates an idea in your head. So, if you do something incorrectly you must be fundamentally incorrect as a person (which, just to clarify, is totally wrong). Since she’s probably been like this your whole life, she has basically trained you to adopt the same sort of thinking (and, come to think of it, I bet her mother/parents/whatever were the same when she was growing up, correct?)
A byproduct of this is that you’d rather fall from the third floor than the penthouse. Like, you have been conditioned in such a way that if you don’t really try or tell yourself that you are lazy or whatever, then it won’t hurt as much when you screw up (but in reality it’ll still suck because of reasons); whereas, if you do try hard and mess up your brain will reinforce those negative thoughts and prevent you from trying harder in the future.
Okay, so what I mean to say, is that it is really good that you’ve decided to be more mindful of your self criticism, and I totally get what you mean and .. yeah stuff.
Oh and I don’t think that your awareness of this is arrogant at all- it is totally legitimate and has actually been researched by people. It also shows a remarkable sense of self and depth of thought which I think is pretty cool.
hope that’s not too weird of me to say… but yeah
