I hate myself

[Tina]

I am untalented and lazy and ugly. Everyone thinks I m smart but I am not. Why should I be alive? Too bad I am too scared of death

[IrmaJean]

Welcome to the community, Tina.

I'm sorry you feel this way about yourself.  Did something happen to bring on such harsh feelings?

 

[4.75hard]

Hating yourself is easy. I know. Accepting yourself for who you are, just being happy, being you can seem like an insurmountable challenge.

The fact is you cannot change things which cannot be changed. You cannot turn back the clock and to allow your mind to live in the past, imagining what could / might have been is pointless, you cannot change the past. What you can do is change the way you think about it, why allow it to live rent free in your mind?

What you can do is from this day forward change the way you think about yourself. This might sound weird but when I stopped giving a shit about what other people thought of me they started to hold me in higher esteem.

Do yourself and the world a favour, accept yourself as you are be happy and show your happiness to others. You shall quickly find people are attracted to you for your positivism and that shall fuel your happiness. I wish you all the very best. I have every confidence that you shall get through this and have an enjoyable life. For get your self image, Listen to those who are in your corner.

Why would people think you were smart if you were not? You need to give yourself some credit.

Brian 4.75 hard.

 

[Guest]

I know how you feel, but I will say when you try even just a bit, things get better little by little. Have you talked to anyone about how you've been feeling? Is there anything in particular that has you feeling this way? 

[LaLa]

Hello, Tina, welcome!

2 hours ago, Tina said:

I am untalented and lazy and ugly. Everyone thinks I m smart but I am not. Why should I be alive? 

Do you really think that "untalented and/or lazy and/or ugly" people should't exist, should kill themselves all?

More importantly; "untalented" likely means you haven't found your particular talents yet, "lazy" means you lack motivation and/or energy (possibly due to mental health issues) and "ugly" is a very subjective judgement (possibly due to lack of love/appreciation of your close-ones) that could change over time.

So... why should you stay alive? Perhaps, for instance, to find out if those things can change for better in your life... I bet they can, although it would need help of others and your willingness to find this help and let it happen - which is all hard, but... very probably worth the results...

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck! Take care and keep us posted.

 

 

 

[Tina]

5 hours ago, IrmaJean said:

Welcome to the community, Tina.

I'm sorry you feel this way about yourself.  Did something happen to bring on such harsh feelings?

 

I got B in class. However, I have been realizing I am useless every single day. I am not sure if this is real, or if I am doing it just for attention.

[Guest]

You seem far too hard on yourself dear... You are human as such you can't be perfect and little mistakes don't make you useless. I hope you can find a way to be easier on yourself. 

[IrmaJean]

I agree with Sed, none of us human beings are perfect. We can all only do our best. A B is still a very good grade. Are you able to have some compassion for yourself?

Will school be over for the summer shortly? I hope you can participate in some fun activities soon. It might help to ease some of the pressure you've been putting on yourself.

I hope you have family and friends there with you who are supportive. Take care, Tina.

[Obsolete]

On Wednesday, June 15, 2016 at 11:48 AM, Tina said:

I am untalented and lazy and ugly. Everyone thinks I m smart but I am not. Why should I be alive? Too bad I am too scared of death

im likely the least qualified person on here to be dishing out advice given my ups and down however the best solution I ever heard was to find something(s) you're absolutely passionate about and persue them without worrying much about all the negative things. Go all in. As you work on what you do best/excel at/ are passionate about , you start to worry less about the other stuff, the negative stuff till you get your joy back.

Good luck.

 

 

[malign]

"Why should I be alive?"  Because the only thing that guarantees that whatever flaws we have will be permanent is cutting off our chance to change.

So what if you're "not smart"?  Lots of people aren't.  I would've said that being nice, for instance, was far more important.

And that's just an example.  What you've listed are a series of traits that you believe are important, at the moment, and that you believe all those traits are bad.  And if you're thinking about dying because of them, you must believe they're permanent (not to mention, really bad).

Are there any traits you're not thinking of?  How certain are you about your own evaluations of the traits you listed?  How sure are you that they're permanent?

I was suicidal at one point in my life, and one of the biggest crocks of shit I ever heard was being told I was "just" doing it for the attention.  Well, duh!  Suicide itself wouldn't change anything, but it was a very definite message from me to me that there was something terribly wrong.  It was for attention:  my attention!

"You're just doing this for the attention" is something a person would say who doesn't believe that every human deserves attention, and so isn't about to give you any, any other way.  I'm not sure that person's opinion should be granted a great deal of weight in your life.

It sounds like shame is something of a tradition, as well, for you;  something to accept from others, and to generate towards yourself.  But shame is a weird thing, really:  we generally don't give it to others the same way we give it to ourselves.  Would you really urge a friend of yours to kill themselves because they were "untalented, lazy, and ugly"?  So, why are you urging yourself to?

[Tina]

No.. I would never do that. However, it seems hopeless sometimes. There is a girl in out class and she is perfect. And it is so unfair! She can sing, dance, she knows everything and gets everything and there am I, with terrible face, no personality and nothing I can do properly.

[Lantrier]

You are not less important than the others that you think are better. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that we can work on our imperfections if we think we have some. I think we have to stop comparing ourself with the others, because it can only serve us no good. If someone has success in life, it is because he is lucky, not because he has worked hard, since many work hard and have no success anyway. It's just a matter of luck, and perhaps one day its going to be your turn. Life is unfair, so the must important thing that we must say to our head is that we are mattering as much. if not more, than the favored group.

[Tina]

I do not know what to do. It seems my whole life will be for nothing.

[Obsolete]

Your life being for nothing is a very real possibility if you don't do anything about it. The power to make your life worthwhile lies within you. I think that's the scary thing about life is that the responsibility to make life what we want it to be lies with us by dealing with those  things which are within our scope of control. 

It's not easy and you are not alone in how you feel.

Good luck to you.

 

 

[LaLa]

I like so much what others posted here already and can only agree!

But perhaps some of the remarks and references that occurred to me could be insightful for you (or someone else?), too, so I'm going to share them:

Quote

There is a girl in out class and she is perfect. And it is so unfair! She can sing, dance, she knows everything and gets everything

When reading this, it instantly occurred to me: Let alone the fact that nobody is perfect (you surely know that and "perfect" is just a compliment from you  ); how can you know if she's not unhappy, perhaps sometimes even suicidal, herself? You cannot know, there are many people who seem perfectly happy on the outside and... have hidden self-esteem issues, suffer without letting know anybody, ... some of them even commit suicide (and then everybody's shocked "why would they? They had it all!..."). Why do you value so much these external characteristics of another person? And even if she is happy, why would you envy her? (I'm sorry, this might be a stupid question because I'm biased: Envy and jealousy are the only emotions I've never experienced in my life, so... it's hard for me to imagine to be in a place of someone who is experiencing them  . But I hope I still have some helpful things / ideas to share... Anyway; the question isn't meant as a reproach / criticism, but as a genuine inquiry and the answer is important for you to find, not for me to understand (or even know/read)! I hope you'll take the question with this in mind.)

Here are some sources that I recommend you in this context:

https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_philosophy_of_success

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sapient-nature/201505/smart-successful-and-yet-not-happy

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/why-so-many-smart-people-arent-happy/479832/

http://oliveremberton.com/2014/the-problem-isnt-that-life-is-unfair-its-your-broken-idea-of-fairness/

A very long read, but I think some ideas may be insightful for you and the others are "at least" interesting (?):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

I also recommend many YT videos of "The School of life" channel. For instance, this is about partners and love, but it says so much and so well about everybody being imperfect that I really recommend it to you even if you don't struggle with relationships (yet?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuKV2DI9-Jg

(you can also check for "the meaning of life" at the same YT channel, for instance )

Quote

I do not know what to do.

This is at least a shift in a good direction: You admit not knowing, you don't see death as the only / the best solution  .

Quote

It seems my whole life will be for nothing.

Like several other members of this community, I also know this feeling (and, I forgot to mention, I used to be suicidal, too, quite often for many years). So... when I'm "arguing with you" about life and suicide and self-esteem, it's not that I don't understand. But I have to "argue", because I know you can't tell/know this now. It's true that from one of possible perspectives, all our lives are "for nothing" (we'll be all death relatively soon, we're here only for a while from the cosmic perspective and most of us can influence "too little" in the world... not to mention we all suffer (more or less) just because we're alive - see, if you want - this, for instance: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/354814.David_Benatar).

So... instead of telling yourself that your "whole life will be for nothing", you can take your life and "make something" out of it, but first of all, start figuring out what would you like it to be, what is really important, how you could do something to move forward in the right direction (your aims may change in time as well as some of your abilities and desired etc.). You may stay alive to explore the possibilities and to see the changes (some will be very probably for better) that life will bring to you...

Here is an excerpt from the book (I recommend it   ) The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt:

 

Quote

 

I had became obsessed with the question “What is the meaning of life?” I wrote my personal statement for college admissions on the meaninglessness of life. I spent the winter of my senior year in a kind of philosophical depression—not a clinical depression, just a pervasive sense that everything was pointless. In the grand scheme of things, I thought, it really didn’t matter whether I got into college, or whether the Earth was destroyed by an asteroid or by nuclear war.

[...]

from one perspective it really wouldn’t matter if I killed myself tomorrow. Very well, then everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail. If this really is all there is, why not embrace it, rather than throw it away? I don’t know whether this realization lifted my mood or whether an improving mood helped me to reframe the problem with hope; but my existential depression lifted and I enjoyed the last months of high school.

 

What do you think?

 

[LaLa]

Sorry for overwhelming you with quotes and links  , but you know; you can choose the time when read them, it's not "all for today", so...  

As I was searching for the quote above, I saw some more I have copied from that book and I may share them here with you and other readers, too (perhaps I've already done it elsewhere on the forum, but...):

Quote

- psychologist Dan McAdams has suggested that personality really has three levels, and too much attention has been paid to the lowest level, the basic traits. A second level of personality, “characteristic adaptations,” […]

- The third level of personality is that of the “life story.”

- […] McAdams describes as an “evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth.”

- Most of the life goals that people pursue at the level of “characteristic adaptations” can be sorted—as the psychologist Robert Emmons has found—into four categories: work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society).

- […] psychologists Ken Sheldon and Tim Kasser have found that people who are mentally healthy and happy have a higher degree of “vertical coherence” among their goals—that is, higher-level (long term) goals and lower-level (immediate) goals all fit together well […].

- people who have a relatively negative affective style (complete with more activity in the front right cortex than the front left) live in a world filled with many more threats and have less confidence that they can deal with them. They develop a coping style that relies more heavily on avoidance and other defense mechanisms. They work harder to manage their pain than to fix their problems, so their problems often get worse. Drawing the lesson that the world is unjust and uncontrollable, and that things often work out for the worst, they weave this lesson into their life story

- H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C, as I said in chapter 6, is love.

- The second most important part of C is having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement.

- paraphrase Marcus Aurelius […] “Work itself is but what you deem it.”

- Work at its best, then, is about connection, engagement, and commitment. As the poet Kahlil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible.”

- Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right. Happiness comes not just from within, as Buddha and Epictetus supposed, or even from a combination of internal and external factors (as I suggested as a temporary fix at the end of chapter 5). The correct version of the happiness hypothesis, as I’ll illustrate below, is that happiness comes from between.

Some point in the context of what you wrote:

- You haven't yet found "a right way how to see and tell your life story. You tell it, so far, as a failure, as a comparison with somebody you idealize, as a way to nowhere, ... But there are many other possible narratives to the same reality...

- How are your relationships? Would you mind post more about them?

- What about work? And volunteering? I know finding a job can be very difficult now and not enough time for volunteering, but... perhaps you can find an activity that would at least make you feel "useful" and make you see you're able to do "something" valuable.

 

 

 

 

[IrmaJean]

I'm not sure how old you might be, Tina, but I had a very difficult time feeling okay with myself during my middle and high school years too. The teenage years can be a challenging time. You're trying to find yourself, form an identity, and fitting in some way feels very important. It was a long time ago now for me and things have changed so much for the better, but I do remember being upset and crying a lot. I do relate on some level. It is possible too that things can improve for you as they did for me. I hope you feel better.

I doubt very much that anyone is perfect though I hear you that it feels that way right now. Each one of us is a unique individual and we each have our own strengths and weaknesses, I think. Perhaps others were born with some gifts, maybe too they worked hard to attain what they have, maybe even both...In the end, we aren't them. Ultimately the only life we have some control over is our own. Possibly too, I think if we put a lot of energy into thinking about what others' lives are like, it could keep us from facing what we need to look at within our own.

What do you enjoy, Tina? What brings a smile to your face and a light in your heart? Maybe it isn't singing (I can't carry a tune myself) and that's okay. Maybe you aren't sure yet what your passions and strengths are and that's okay too. I think if you're open to yourself, to new experiences, and to challenging yourself, you will find your way. What do you think?



 

[Tina]

I am 17. I study at high school and eant to get to university and become scientist. Genetics and macrobiology.. I hav few friends and the only people who would miss me are my parents and brother. 

[IrmaJean]

Genetics and macrobiology sound very interesting. That is wonderful!  I did always find genetics interesting, though complicated. Is there a science club you might join? If so, maybe you could meet some people there who share your interest. 

Are your parents supportive? I hope so.

You might be surprised to know how many people you touch in your lifetime. Maybe you might even make an important scientific discovery? You have a goal in mind and a direction and that is great.

I'm sorry you feel down, Tina. I believe we each have our own light. I hope you find the path to shining your light very brightly. In the meantime, we're here to support you. There are people out there who care.

Take gentle care of you.

[Tina]

Thanks everyone. I feel better now.