The List of Reasons Not Everyone Hates Me

A lot of people suggest to me that I “talk back” to whatever voice is in my head telling me negative things about myself. I haven’t found this to be a super useful strategy. If it works for you, great. Do that. For me, talking back to negative thoughts about myself only seems to encourage more negative thoughts.

The problem (I think) is that the part of my brain that suggests that I am actually a disgusting human being who deserves to be dead THINKS that it is very logical. It THINKS that I can make a pro and con list of the reasons that I should stay alive or be dead, and that when I look at the list, it will be able to logically sort through the information and make a rational decision about it. Unfortunately, this isn’t really true.

[I will say right here that I am highly skeptical about the idea that anyone is actually logical. My experience with the people who most loudly insist they are logical is merely that they refuse to see their own emotions working in the background and do so more often and more annoyingly than people who do not proclaim loudly how logical they are, but actually see their own emotions and acknowledge how much emotions are always behind the scenes, pretending to be logical because logical is better than emotional. We can have a discussion at a later time about the misogyny behind this kind of ridiculous judgment but for now, just accept that I don’t think I’m less logical than any other human, but I do try to be aware of my own emotionally driven behavior.]

So if I’m making a list of all the mistakes I’ve made, it will be a very long list. For whatever reason, my brain has been highly trained to see problems. It sees them everywhere, in everyone, and it can’t not see them. But mostly, it sees them in myself and it keeps track of them because I have a very good memory for all my mistakes. What I’m much less good at (much less well-trained at) is making any kind of compensatory list of all my good traits, people who find me to be delightful and sometimes even truly important to their lives, the contributions I make to the world that are big and small and that are positive, and my potential to continue to do those things.

My list is going to be very skewed, is what I’m saying. And my depressed brain will tell me that this is merely “the truth” and that logic dictates that I don’t deserve to stay alive. Because if you look at all the past mistakes, then that will give you a good idea of the number of future mistakes I will make, many likely unforgivable and overall, this means that logically, I am not an asset to the human race and logically, I should not remain alive because it would be kinder to let better people do that.

The other problem is that when I am this level of depressed, the idea that I would be able to figure out what to say back to the negative voices in my head is vastly overestimated. Even if I try to imagine my best friends (many of whom have tried to talk me out of my suicidal depression at long length) telling me why I deserve to stay alive, I immediately dismiss all of their so-called logic because they are just being kind and besides, they are totally subjectively biased in my favor. And besides, they are too nice to say that they actually agree that I should be dead.

Where does that leave me? Just not paying attention to the peanut gallery in my head that offers me “logical” lists of reasons I should be dead and is perfectly happy to continue on with a list of unforgivable mistakes I made, beginning with marrying in the Mormon temple and raising all of my children Mormon and trying to stay Mormon even when I absolutely had stopped believing all of it because it seemed logical to me that it was still a good way to live, even if it wasn’t a true way to live.

Now, it may be that as I move past the massive triple tragedies that I’ve lived through (daughter’s stillbirth, loss of faith in Mormonism, end of marriage and my entire life before), I will start to see myself more clearly and in more balance. I don’t particularly hold out hope for this. Mostly I think I will have to keep fighting this fight of depression that rises up and is acute for a time and then stops being as constant a presence for a few years—like a cancer of the soul.

I don’t think there’s any way that my brain is going to be convinced that I deserve to stay alive. I don’t think it’s going to be able to come up with a list that has more pros than cons. The best I can manage is to say that I’m probably not worse than any other random human and that this is just what it means to be human—to feel disgusting sometimes and wait to not feel disgusting. It isn’t “true” because nothing is actually true. It’s just a lived experience and that’s all there is. It’s enough. Today anyway.