diribigal wrote: ↑Sat Dec 29, 2018 8:52 am
You’re catastrophizing and declaring yourself garbage for, at worst, a mistake of saying something in the wrong place. That is distorted thinking, even if you don’t believe it. And you actually are performing a sort of self-harm by beating yourself up like this.
You’re an incredibly nice person who tries to help others. It’s okay to be hurt and to vent about it in an appropriate unrelated place, like here. It’s not okay to beat yourself up or leap to absolutes.
It’s hard to explain, but it’s kind of an instantaneous thing? I really did get chased a lot of places in the past for getting too comfortable and saying the wrong thing. Whenever I go anywhere and see people using really heated or mocking rhetoric, I’m always afraid it’s going to be turned on me someday. So when someone has a problem with me, I just freeze up and then pretty much move instantly to crying and hurting and beating myself up. I got yelled at and slapped around a lot as a kid, the two things are most likely related.
I always prioritize other people over myself because I don’t feel safe unless people are happy or at least calm.
I can’t go back to Mastodon and use my account now anyways, because I deleted my account. Once it’s deleted, all your posts are gone and your account name is reserved so people can’t use it to troll, so you can’t just reactivate like on Twitter.
Mr. Big wrote: ↑Sat Dec 29, 2018 12:35 pm
diribigal said it best. Please stay safe, Madeline, and feel free to send me a note if you want to talk.
I’m sorry I didn’t. I didn’t really want to talk to anybody over the last day and a half. I just slept a lot.
Perpetual Motion wrote: ↑Sun Dec 30, 2018 2:19 am
I spent my entire life growing up being told that I was gifted and smart
and all that jazz. Boy do I wish I could even
remotely tap into all that potential I
supposedly had right about now. I'm good at basic math? I guess? Not even good at doing it in my head or anything like that. I can just recall what operations to do for what problem, then cheat and use a calculator. I just feel so
dumb and lost all the time. I have vague visions in my mind of things I want to make, but I have no ability to realize them. I can't even do simple things to work my way up to that. The things I want to do
are simple. I even try setting small, easy goals, like "write 500 words a day," but I can't even meet that. I can't do anything right, and it's so fucking frustrating. What am I supposed to do to improve when I can't even make the small steps?
Stop expecting yourself to be a prodigy on your first try. Your expectations for yourself are way out of whack and you’re beating yourself up again.which is probably my fault for melting down in this thread and upsetting you.
I bolded some words so you can kind of see how it looks to anyone else when we beat ourselves up. You’re making assumptions that aren’t warranted in the least and then jumping to conclusions. Using a calculator is cheating? Why, is somebody grading you on your non-academic personal coding projects even after you’ve graduated? How does that measure your intelligence? Even a person extremely gifted in math is still not going to be able to beat a calculator in speed, and in most jobs, being efficient is better than showing off a skill. Your reasoning is distorted because it’s tautological. You can’t do things because you’re telling yourself that you can’t do them, then using the difficulty you have finishing anything under those conditions as proof.
Creative projects don’t happen when you constantly tell yourself that you suck and that you can’t do it. You’re always going to keep coming back saying you can’t do it and that it proves you’re not good at anything.
You want to know what professional writers do when a story is bad and they can’t make it work in revision? They abandon it and write another story. It’s almost meaningless when a first draft is bad, because you’re better served by checking for continuity errors, structural problems, unnecessary verbiage, and so on. If a published writer puts out a first draft, it’s because they’re a Stephen King or some other huge seller who can flex on their editors and get away with it. Your first draft is not going to be perfect. The harder you try to make it perfect, the more unnecessary work you’re doing to something you will still most likely want to fix and tighten up later anyway.
Like, even if you did somehow did a first draft that was perfect, but just ran a spelling and grammar check on it, that’s still a revision, and you’ll still have two drafts. And pushing out a manuscript without at least checking to make sure that it’s got proper punctuation and spelling is like sending your child to school with toilet paper sticking to their shoes.