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Belongs to: Feeling like you re going through struggles alone
I am a monster and I hate it!
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Hi there. First I want to thank you for reaching out. It may feel like a minor effort to make a comment but even big shifts have to begin somewhere. A step is still a step and I applaud you making that step. Wow. yeah, it sounds like the song really resonated with you. Those times when a song or just some lyrics really hit home are always a mix of release and pain. Pain from hearing words that speak to our hurt and also a cathartic release when the inner voice in our head is given an outlet to scream it out. The best songs give us that. I’m sorry to hear that you’re inner voice seems to be judging you harshly. That you’re seeing yourself as a monster. It’s understandable that you would hate feeling that way, thinking that way about yourself. Every time my depressive episodes hit my own inner voice tells me how bad I am. It often speaks the harshest, nastiest junk to me. Beating me down more. Kicking me while I’m hurting. I think we all have a tendency, some more than others, to focus on our disliked traits and amplify them. Depression itself feeds on that negativity bias. Left unchecked that’s what leads us to spiral deeper. We keep hearing more and more criticism that sounds like truth. I can’t tell you how many times I heard similar self hate comments like that. I don’t know your circumstances and I’m by means a therapist but I can tell you from my experience dealing with my own demons that voice is full of it. In fact the lyrics say it perfectly, “I feel like a monster”. There’s an underlying emotion driving a thought but we are not truly a monster but we FEEL like one. It’s been one of the biggest shifts in my own therapy journey to reframe my thoughts. To try and recognize where my thoughts are coming from and especially when I’m feeling a certain way, while valid, I don’t need to confirm the feeling by building a story around it. Sometimes I feel like hell. I feel like a loser or I feel like a failure. Before when I felt this way I would build stories around that. Build on it giving myself all the reasons why it must be true. These days through a tremendous amount of effort I try to recognize the feeling and just say to myself, “that’s fine”. I see the pain. I acknowledge the hurt but don’t listen to any stories that are trying to be made. It’s just the feeling. Good or bad but it starts and ends there. I just wanted to share some of that. To say I hear you. I’ve been in that pain before. You are not alone. I started my journey through my hell little by little. Maybe this is your first step. And if so, I say that’s great. Keep reaching out.
Thank you so much for sharing about the way you’ve been feeling about yourself, friend. It can be pretty overwhelming to keep those thoughts to ourselves, but once we shed light on them, we also welcome the possibility to call out the lies that our mind is trying to tell us. Rest assured that we see you beyond this veil of self-hate that you are carrying. We see YOU, the beauty in you, the value you bring into this world, regardless of what your path looked like so far. The very fact that you are here today, and on top of it sharing these personal feelings, is both beautiful and powerful.
It’s very defeating to feel like you’re your overy own enemy, to look in the mirror every day and only feeling the need to move away from this vision as quickly as possible. Over time, it feels like your body and your mind become a prison that you can’t escape but are forced to deal with. If some days might be manageable, others feel absolutely excruciating, and I’m truly sorry that you’ve been dealing with this, my friend. It’s so hard to feel like our very own mind is a battlefield where we are both the ally and the enemy at the same time, fighting against each other. You might know rationally that these thoughts have a reason to be, but at the same time you feel how much it doesn’t serve you. It’s just a constant tension, an exhausting one, to compose with day in day out, and it hurts even more that most people don’t see it. There’s this dissonance between what you might have learned/internalized about yourself, and the intuition that leads you to feeling that there HAS to be much more than this.
It’s so hard to be in this position. But you did something very powerful today by naming the struggle, naming the lie and how it makes you feel. When you do this, you also learn to detach yourself from it and see the patterns of thoughts/emotions for what it is: a part of your story, but not necessarily a reflection of you, of your heart, of this beautiful soul that you have. You are so much more than any hurtful narrative that your mind might try to convince you of. I know it’s hard to believe it though, even more to feel it. Healing takes time. You took a tremendous step today in this direction. Thank you so much for being here. 