Rambling

They say that you're supposed to forgive yourself for your mistakes

My therapist also says that if no one got harmed it doesn't matter but making an elementary mistake in front of someone who's supposed to know less than me really makes me upset and I don't know how to process this. Literally been weeks but I feel like I've crashed my credibility for good and that it's all over now and I shouldn't ever try to translate again.

Realize this isn't reasonable to think. I feel like the greatest imposter ever though and wonder why someone can't just put me out of my misery and let someone else who's more capable take over this group that I don't even enjoy being in for me.

Really annoying to know that this person is also going to remember this forever because it's regarding a topic they like. I already cried about this on the day of and then the day after over another stupid mistake but at least that other mistake was in front of a stranger online who will 100% not remember me because I already ejected myself from that situation. Can't leave a friendship over a simple mistake on the other hand which really, really bothers me.

I know this is issues with perfectionism. I guess it wouldn't hurt so bad if I already didn't feel extremely insecure about my Japanese ability over the fact that I can't speak it due to social anxiety AND I don't actually have enough interest in Japanese media (due to rigid moral standards and not being that interested in real-people media in general) to actively learn through immersion. I'm just doing shit extremely slowly but I think I've plateaued for life on this which makes it a basically useless skill because I'm not good at it. I also know that that's a problematic way of thinking that won't serve me in the future but that's how it feels. I want it to stop feeling like this. It feels really really bad I hate shame. It's like leaping straight to the gut of "maybe I should just die" every time and I guess this must have something to do with school trauma on getting certain things wrong in front of other people and being shamed for it.

Genuinely though I don't know why I'm still stuck here other than the fact that finding people even at my level in a niche fandom is hard and what's even harder is apparently finding someone with good organizational skills who actually shows up continually. I miss the days when I thought another translator could just take over and run this group and I could just disappear forever. And then they turned out to have like 0 organizational skills and work in giant spurts of everything or nothing every 6 months.

I want to keep in mind that I'm doing this for my friends and the like but it's so hard to think that way when I want to gut myself over a mistake that can't be erased from someone's memory. Big ugh.

It's so not useful because everyone makes mistakes and that means I'm going to make more mistakes just as bad as this one and even worse in the future. I don't know how people live like this, genuinely. How do you not just hate yourself to death for missing obvious shit? Something something having the faith in yourself and that you can grow and change and do better or something. I guess there's all the logic pieces and then there's the real wall of Big Feelings that have to be untangled more somehow at the root of trauma.

I've been listening to The Healthy Compulsive Project podcast recently and they mention that bad coping mechanisms are also adaptive and are often employed as an attempt to protect ourselves from something or another and may have helped us survive whatever happened to us before. Which my therapist has also said, actually. But I guess the difference here is that the way people who are labeled with OCPD go about it is by having "commandments" that are basically things we have to do or believe in or we feel like we've failed our entire existence morally. And one of the common ones is "I will never make mistakes." Which is what's plaguing me right now, though I would qualify mine would probably be "I will never make Stupid mistakes", where "stupid" means "things I should have known". Like if I make a mistake in math that's just because I'm math-stupid by default and I can just say "Well, i'm shit at numbers!" but if it's something I've actually studied or worked on building as a skill... see above.

I guess since I'm already on the topic of this shame wave I might as well try to actually do the exercise in this blog post of theirs.

To start with, I identify with 6/10:

  1. I will never make mistakes.
  2. I will always be productive and I will never waste time.
  3. I will never waste money.
  4. I will always do what I say I will do.
  5. I will never disappoint others.
  6. I will always complete my work before relaxing.
  7. (bonus) "I will never start a project until I know it can be perfect." AND "I will never finish a project until it is perfect." because I prevent myself from starting new things so I can work on my current thing until I finish it (to my attempt at perfection). I guess I'm hybrid "obsessive" and "compulsive" now though I used to lean heavily on "obsessive".

As for reasons... What the blog post said is all true for me:



Do you really need to prove your virtue? And if so, to whom?

Yeah, I feel like I need to. I don't feel like I have virtue to begin with because I can't do anything effective in the world that will make other people's lives materially better due to having social anxiety. This is something I believe about myself and I feel like I have to spend my whole life making up for my major defect to avoid being abandoned by other people.

In terms of self-signaling:

To answer the questions in the linked blog post for this section:

  1. How have you wanted other people to see you, and how have you wanted to see yourself?
    I've wanted other people to see me as someone who's doing something important. This is also how I've wanted to see myself. Because at the root I feel like that's the only way to assure that people won't think that I deserve to die instead.

  2. Is this to compensate for what you think is a shortcoming?
    yeah.

  3. Check to see if you feel extra pressure or urgency in your body to prove yourself.
    yeah.

  4. What is the story you’ve told yourself that has lead you to feel that you need to make others see you differently? Might that story be inaccurate?
    People don't like people who aren't useful to them. They will abandon people who aren't useful to them. They will pretend those people don't exist and they will wish every moment they have to interact with you that you were a different, more capable person. People might not "love" someone who is useful, but they will admire them and in general not wish them poorly. When I had selective mutism no one helped me.
    I beat selective mutism because my 4th grade teacher got so mad at me for being "rude" to another kid by not being able to comment on his project that she took me aside to scold me and then sent me to the principal's office, crying, and told me I had to write 3 good things about his project. At the principal's office, no one paid me any attention. I cried until I couldn't cry anymore, and then I did what I was told (I even wrote 4). I was able to talk after that in school. All my teachers liked me better. I didn't get pitying looks from my peers or friends after that. Everyone liked me better because I was hurt enough until I could perform. People only care about useful people and they hate troublemakers.
    I don't know if this story is inaccurate. It certainly doesn't feel that way. I don't think people are kind. I think the people that are kind will stop being kind when I am too much trouble. People like my therapist will insist that there are kind people and my teacher was mean. Kind people also don't know how to help you then, since a lot of other teachers just didn't know what to do with me. Kind people cannot save you from society's expectations and it is all a matter of time. It is a matter of time until my friends and family stop liking me and a matter of time until I am abandoned again.
    Realistically speaking, most people would say this is inaccurate. Because they believe that good people make up something like 50% of the population at least when I believe it is more like 20%.

  5. Have your natural tendencies for self-improvement been hijacked to prove that you’re respectable? Has that energy gone into appearances rather than growth?
    Yeah I mean, it depends on how you define growth but almost certainly considering that I have problems.

  6. Do you sacrifice too much (e.g. relationships, health, pleasure) in trying to get others (or yourself) to see you in a particular way?
    Relationships and pleasure mostly, but it doesn't even always feel like my choice due to the social anxiety component. The pleasure thing feels more like my choice though. Health-wise I'm trying to be better now because I decided I really, really hate migraines.

  7. Where does your reputation sit in your list of priorities? What goals might be more fulfilling to you than proving yourself?
    Probably like number 2. My eternal issue is about not being good enough. I could literally forego so many things if I could just perform and be normal but instead I'm cursed with social anxiety. The only thing that's more fulfilling is art and my creative project but that's just because I may be fooling myself into thinking that I actually have good ideas and good messages to include blah blah.



Do you really want to give over so much power to keep from getting in trouble with people who themselves have been commandeered by commandments?

Most of the world appears to believe that people who don't earn money are better off dead, given by how we generally think of people who are homeless. I don't agree with them but these are also the people with power. Do I really have that much power in this to begin with?

Less intellectualizing, my dad (who honestly displays aspects of OCPD no matter how low his self-report POPS test was) told me over and over as I grew up -- and continues to say this -- that you have to be realistic and be able to to support yourself financially. You can do whatever you want on the side as long as that's true. You can also do whatever career you want as long as you earn your security. So he never told me to do anything because the result > the journey. The joke is that by having social anxiety I can't even go to a fucking job interview and thus I can never git gud at earning money and therefore never be able to hit the bare minimum of a life that is worth something to him.

My mom was someone who could earn money and therefore she is unfortunately better than me even though she's also a bigot whose own unmanaged bipolar wrecked havoc on me. But she had the necessary ingredients to being happy materially. I don't. I hate that she is better than me.

In terms of my parents, I'm trying to let this go. I'm trying to say I don't need them. I don't need my dad anymore because he doesn't understand me and doesn't understand that I don't have anything to live for if not for my illusions of my art projects. In terms of people who haven't personally harmed me, though, I do feel bad about letting them down. I feel bad about being an inconvenience to them. I feel bad about not helping them. Maybe it would be easier if it didn't feel like every adult who I meet asks me what I'm doing for a job and how much it pays and yada yada doo. The problem with seeing the world as only truly having 20% nice people is that it also means that 80% of the world holds the same measuring stick up to you as my dad does (and when he does it, it's even with well-intentioned love! figure that!).

So do I really want to give up this much power? I don't know. I don't feel like I have power. In fact I just feel like at this point I'm doing things because I already proved that I can't be anything but a failure so there's nothing else to do but continue my failure things in a way that makes me marginally more happy because the other option (killing myself) wasn't going to pan out due to being a coward.



Are you really so depraved that you need to wear a moral chastity belt to stay out of trouble?
Feels this way. I feel like I didn't improve myself on anything in middle school because I was off playing Latale. Funny part now is that I'm yet playing Latale again now but I guess I'm able to hit the brakes a bit more as an adult.

In college I often thought to myself how much further I'd be along in art and Japanese if I actually sat down and did it instead of moping about. But the problem is that I knew that I'll never be perfect in either of these things even if I try so it's just like an endless cycle of regret for not trying harder.

Nowadays I just cut to the trying to try to preempt this major feeling of regret. I have to say that it actually kind of works. So um. I don't think I'm interpreting this one right if my answer is like "Yeah, though?"



Do I live by ideals or commandments? What are my top 10?
Commandments. Some of them are already listed above. At this point I'm mostly feeling tired of writing all the other stuff that trying to think about like 3 more golden ones seems like too much effort. Some random ones that I can think of right now:

  1. I will never inconvenience or harm others.
  2. I will never expect someone to stay.
  3. I will never pretend I am better than others. I am always the bare minimum at best.
  4. I will always be useful to others, or I will leave.
  5. I will never give things more credit than they are due via my positive attention. I will not be duped into thinking that someone is saying something that is progressive when they are not. I will not idolize anything, for if I do I will be a fool who was used and tossed away by said thing.
  6. I will never expect others to accommodate me or understand me.

How did I arrive at them? Is there an objective basis for them?
They are the way they are because my parents were only interested in how I could serve them emotionally and never about my actual emotional experience. They are the way they are because my first school was over-achieving and I didn't have the talent for math or science when both of my parents do. They are the way they are because my parents took turns using me emotionally and then abandoning me, both emotionally and physically. They are the way they are because I woke up with selective mutism and was punished for it. They are the way they are because I observed with my very own eyes the difference in how people treated me when I performed versus when I did not, and I am unable to shake that as my basis for how I see the world and other people. They are the way they are because I think people really hate disabled people. And I'm not even "disabled" to anyone besides my therapist.

The objective basis here is that the people around me are all more concerned about their own lives than about caring for me. Which, fair, I guess. Whether or not that's actually statistically objective on a broad scale is impossible to measure. Lots of people will say they don't believe in cruelty and then support policies that are cruel, and I don't know what you call that. Do you believe in the words or the actions, even if the actions come from ignorance? I believe more in actions. I believe people don't care about me and I'm not sure they should.

Do they serve integrity, or insecurity?
Insecurity, I guess. Just doesn't feel like I can imagine something different.

Do they lead me to wellbeing, or dissatisfaction?
Dissatisfaction.

What keeps me hanging on to them?
I want to prepare myself for being used and abandoned. That and because I feel like it's my duty to make my dad happy because he's such a sad old man who has been a sad old man for nearly 30 years at this point. My therapist has been trying to untangle this one through EMDR but I guess it's a multiple whammy problem of having a parent that:

I just want to be able to know I lived my life right. I'm just tired. I just want to be secure and not to need anyone. I know this is just being counter-dependent but it's because i'm already so bad at being independent. I don't want to expect things from anyone. I don't expect things from my parents, anymore. My project partner has a special brain that will forget people (not intentionally) after not talking to them for a few years.

If I can't matter, I want to know that I served my purpose well.

If I can't be seen and understood, I want to know that I helped someone who is living a better, more important life than me.

I want to know that I was helpful even if I will be forgotten.

#moping