Hey #137: Something is wrong with me!
The last edition received a deep resonance from you all. Thank you. Like the majority of the HeyEmotions editions, I wrote it to myself.
Today also, I'm writing to myself. It’s one of the major discoveries of my life. Let’s begin! :)
Despite appearing confident, you struggle to believe in yourself.
It’s like standing on a firm ground which only you know is hollow within. You are aware of its hollowness to an extent that even the thought of having to actually face it, scares the shit out of you.
So, you continue to play along on that firm ground, making yourself believe in the ground’s firmness within and without, and ignoring every evidence which can prove your belief wrong.
Each time you speak about it to your loved ones, they assure you it’s nothing, that it’s common, that such a “doubt” is the mark of being confident.
You don’t know better. So, you believe in them.
Truth be told, you want to believe in them. Because deep within you know they are wrong — That you’re not really confident. That you don’t believe in yourself as much as they think you do or should do. You also know…
When you borrow your confidence from others, it comes with an expiry date.
And when you have always felt like an imposter, you remain aware of that expiry date. So, you ensure delaying this expiry date in the hope of making yourself believe that you’re indeed confident inside out.
But the low yet unshakeable voice coming from the pit of your awareness doesn’t shush. It keeps you on your toes by telling you,
“The facade will come down sooner or later. You are going to see how wrong you have been! You are going to witness the hollowness of your confidence.”
It sends a shiver down your spine. It threatens to shake your self-image. And along with it shakes all your dreams, goals, wishes and hopes.
But you’ve had good practice. So, you wipe your sweat, pick yourself up, and lay out the plan to not give in to this voice. That’s when your brilliant analytical mind comes to your aid.
Alas, like an earworm, the voice continues to grab your attention. But you manage to shush it down with your determination and commitment.
One after the other, you start ticking off your goals and dreams as an evidence of your confidence and self-belief. You look at that job, at your wealth, at that relationship, at your health and fitness…[enter anything here], and then look at yourself with pride to announce…
“I did it! I am indeed confident. My self-belief made it all possible. I FUCKING DID IT!”
Every new declaration of your confidence to yourself gets louder than the previous one. Because it’s your attempt to bury that sneaky voice.
You continue to announce your victory against that voice. You want that voice to accept its defeat.
But the voice doesn’t budge. It still repeats the same words…
“The facade will come down sooner or later. You are going to see how wrong you have been! You are going to witness the hollowness of your confidence.”
You accumulate more evidence. You get louder than ever. Yet the voice doesn’t go away.
One day, you get tired.
Tired of the charade of proving this voice wrong. Tired of the endless pursuit of evidence to defy this voice.
As you drop your guards, the voice gets louder. It’s no longer feeble. It starts screaming through the same accolades you gathered to prove it wrong. It shows the hollowness of your confidence through your career, wealth, relationships, fitness…
You feel scared of losing it all. You feel the lack of willpower to keep sustaining it.
The facade does start to come down…
But you don’t retaliate. You don’t have it in you to retaliate. You find it futile to retaliate. Because you’re tired and defeated.
The voice starts excavating your long-buried fears. The fears of being seen, being unlovable, being flawed, being not enough…
You don’t run. You don’t hide. Heck, you find it hard to run and hide even when you want to. You’re tired. Gradually, your lack of escape starts acting in your favor.
Like a movie, your fears make themselves visible in front of you.
You cry. You tremble. But you keep watching this movie.
It unravels a seemingly-ancient-yet-apparently-fresh feeling of “Something is wrong with me”.
Like the white clouds suddenly appearing on a clear blue sky, this feeling starts bringing a sense of familiarity. It takes you a while. But you recognize — “This feeling has been the precursor of my EVERY decision and choice so far…”
You begin to see how this feeling is not just a feeling, but a belief. A belief that something is wrong with you. It has been making you cautious in every twist and turn of day-to-day life. You have always felt a pressure to do, feel, be, think, act “right” as an attempt to not end up proving that something has indeed been wrong with you.
You remember those frequent and quick inner dialogues driven by a vehement urgency, pressure and fear — before, during and after making every small and big choice of your life…
“Am I sure I’m not wrong in feeling so?”
“Wait, is that how I’m supposed to think?”
“Am I 100% sure I’m allowed to express myself this way?”
“I must have done something wrong if this relationship isn’t working!”
“Why am I surprised after this failure? It’s a fact I can’t do anything right.”
.
.
.
You start finding a pattern in your inner-criticism that shows how it has always been inclined towards affirming, proving, building on your deep-rooted belief of “Something is wrong with me”.
For the first time, you see it clearly:
Deep within, you’ve always believed that you’re inherently flawed, that something is inherently wrong with you, that you can never get it right, that you’ll fuck it up sooner or later. Hence, you’ve always struggled to believe in yourself, despite the real-world evidence of your confidence.
You realize your lack of self-belief and need to constantly prove your confidence to yourself has been stemming from the belief of “Something is wrong with me”.
“DAMN!” — You say to yourself while tears flow down your cheeks.
“Something is wrong with me.
Something is wrong with me.
Something is wrong with me.
.
.
.
.
Why would something be wrong with me? How can something be wrong with me? What does “wrong” even mean? Where is it coming from?”
New questions appear.
By now, you’ve learnt how to sit with the discomfort of not knowing answers of the most triggering questions. So, you stay put.
You continue with your inner work practices, keeping these questions on the forefront.
With time, answers knock on your door…
The belief of “Something is wrong with me” stems from your childhood.
Whenever you made mistakes as a kid, you were reprimanded in ways which made you feel unsafe. The unsafety pushed you into an urgency of finding safety asap.
You felt a mayhem of emotions. But no-one helped you to manage those emotions. So, you gathered — the job of feeling safe again was on you. And that job could be done by finding the reason for unsafety and annihilating it.
So, you looked.
As a kid, you were incapable of perceiving your parents/ caregivers and the world around you as unsafe due to the yet-to-be developed ability of identifying threats. You believed the world around you was always picture-perfect. After all, it had to be…for you to feel safe.
So, when you felt unsafe, you didn’t doubt the world around you. Since you still needed to cope with the feeling of unsafety by figuring out its reasons, your search led you to picking YOURSELF. You concluded, “I did something wrong. I’m bad. I upsetted mommy. I made her angry. She won’t love me now. I make bad things happen. No-one will ever love me…”
Through self-blame you tried to annihilate the source of unsafety. And all of it happened in a jiffy.
From you spilling milk on the floor to your parents scolding you to you crying out of fear — it happened all too quick. The more you were reprimanded without any help in self-regulation afterwards, the more efficient you became in the whole process of self-blaming.
No-one corrected you. And you didn’t know there was a need for any correction to begin with.
That self-blame led to guilt which with time became shame.
From “I’m doing something wrong”, it transformed into “I’m wrong. Something is wrong with me.”
Without knowing, you ended up creating a black hole of worthlessness within in exchange for feeling safe in the moment.
As the answers keep on arriving, you furthermore see…
To this day, you use the same mechanism of self-blame to make yourself feel safe. Just that, now it’s so embedded in your system that you don’t spot it easily.
You realize…
While growing up, as you developed your worldviews and ability to judge, you started using another mechanism to feel safe — bifurcating the outer world into right and wrong, and searching for all that is “wrong” (according to you) as the reasons for your pain, discomfort and suffering.
Some of this search was indeed needed. While the rest of it was your way of convincing yourself, “Nothing is wrong with me. It’s that person or circumstance or situation which is wrong, henceforth causing me pain.”
As a kid, you began with internalizing the blame. Then, as you grew up, you diversified into externalizing blame. Now, you use both.
Before you could digest this huge chunk of reality check, another fact baffles you…
You’ve an incessant need to deal with your pain by putting it on someone (be it yourself only) or something. It’s not entirely wrong as it has helped you understand the destructive patterns which were actually causing you harm. But at the same time, it has also made you incapable of sitting with your pain and discomfort without analyzing it.
It has distanced you from the fact that not all pains in this human life can be traced back to a particular reason, that many times pain exists simply because it’s a part of being human, that there needn’t always exist a senseful reason to justify your raw pain.
But you struggle to understand it.
You continue to bifurcate the world (both your inner and outer worlds) into right and wrong, so that you can judge well and accomplish your goal of finding reasons for your pain and suffering.
More often than not, you are on the lookout for what went “wrong” because you believe that for pain and suffering to exist, something must have to go wrong in the first place!
So, it’s not just your childhood belief of “Something is wrong with me”. It’s also your strong fixation at finding “wrong” in life which makes you suffer.
You understand…
Your lack of self-belief and confidence is only one of the many extensions of this suffering.
Slowly, you begin to discard the rigid definitions of “right” and “wrong” which you knowingly and unknowingly ended up borrowing from others. You dissolve illusions which have been propagated to suffocate freedom in timidity. You let go of the outdated coping mechanisms for safety. You keep strengthening your connection with your true self which becomes your guidance to determine what is right and wrong for YOU in a given moment.
As you follow this guidance, you don’t only find your unshakeable self-belief and confidence, but also unlock the freedom which you didn’t know could exist.
And in that freedom echoes a chuckle…
“I don’t remember what was wrong with me to even begin with!”
🦋
See you next Thursday,
Ashi
ps: It’s my lived experience which you just read. If you’d like me to help you declutter your beliefs and conditioning, and find your way towards unshakeable self-belief and confidence, explore working with me 1:1 :)