'I Failed Miserably and Now I'm So Ashamed I Can't See Straight!'

Guilt and shame and self-hatred might've helped motivate you before, but now what you need is radical self-love and self-acceptance.

Woman Leaving the Bath (1901), Pablo Picasso

Hi Polly.

Excuse my brevity, I could write extensively about how much your writing has helped me over the years.

You talk a lot about forgiving yourself. I understand this in theory, but I’m having a hard time putting it into practice. I was a star student, went to an Ivy League school, then got into a top graduate program at a corporation that should have set me up for life. No one was worried about me. I can’t quite put a finger on where things went wrong, but they did. A combination of mental health struggles, housing instability and relationship issues compounded and I started messing up at work. A lot. I forgot that even if you don’t enjoy your work or convince yourself that it’s acceptable to tap out, it isn’t. People rely on you, things have consequences, your reputation will be affected.

Now I am out the other side. Somewhat. I can see on the one hand that my struggles were real. I was suicidal, I convinced myself trying hard at a job that gave nothing back was for losers. But of course this was a vicious cycle. And a small voice tells me I wasn’t really struggling, that I am lazy and incompetent and I blame other people for my own laziness and incompetence.

I am very fearful about my future, and I also feel it was all my fault, and I deserve to be unhappy. Other people go through much worse than I did and they get up and go in everyday, or they take the advice of their therapist and they stop working.

I can’t really tell what is real. I don’t know if I am an awful, lazy person who deserves nothing but failure, or if I am someone who struggled and handled it badly and deserves a second-chance and forgiveness. It’s hard when some people who’ve worked with you and know you think you are great, and others hate your guts. I’m not sure that is normal? So I must be a bad person. And how do I live knowing some people think badly of me?

The current situation is this: I’ve bombed down the ladder through a lot of jobs some people would kill for. I think I burned out, but is that just another excuse for being a lazy, entitled bitch? I have friends, a good relationship with my parents and partner. So I’m not a total psycho. But I fear that the good view they have of me is fake, and I am awful. I want redemption and the chance at a new career, one I think I’d be good at. But will I ever shake the guilt of the last few years? Or the reputational damage that I’m not even sure is real or just in my head... or it’s real for some people, but does that matter in the grand scheme? And is it deserved? I have no sense of reality, but maybe that’s a way of avoiding responsibility for the fact that I fucked up. But did I? Or was I struggling in a difficult job at a hard time without much support? And so it goes. I want another chance but I’m not sure I deserve it. The guilt and — more selfishly — the fear that it’s too late for redemption is heavy.

I know you can’t tell me if I deserve to fail or not. Maybe you can just help me figure it out? My therapist and friends tell me it’s not my fault, but they would say that. I have been lazy, entitled, and difficult. But I was struggling. I’m not sure that excuses anything. It’s probably just my personality. So I will learn my lessons and repent. But how do I get my head straight and believe I deserve another chance when other people just... don’t act like this?

Thank you, Polly.

The Worst

Dear The Worst,

People struggle and fall apart and fail for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with how lovable or hard working or ethical or reasonable they are. We all mess up things that we think we want regularly, simply because we’re conflicted or confused or overwhelmed. When you’ve been navigating educational settings for most of your life and suddenly you’re working in an office and you don’t understand how it works and you feel overwhelmed and anxious and depressed but everyone around you just keeps getting their jobs done? That’s not easy at all.

And let’s get real. You were suicidal. Take that seriously. Laziness has nothing to do with feeling suicidal. When you express that sentiment, what you tell me is that you blame yourself for everything you feel. EVERYTHING. All feelings.

I used to do that. It’s no way to live. You have to learn to feel emotions without blaming yourself for them. It will take time to get there, but you’ll get there eventually. Be patient. Just know that this is the most important part of your work. You have to grant yourself the RIGHT to feel what you feel, first and foremost.

To be clear, it’s absolutely normal to veer off your chosen path and question everything. We don’t have enough conversations about how normal that is. It’s normal to wonder why you work where you work, or wonder why you’re married, or wonder why you chose the life you did. It’s absolutely common to feel conflicted. We all get confused and restless and bored and depressed. We all second-guess the path we’re on. It’s natural.

When you HATE YOURSELF for feeling conflicted, that causes big problems in your life. You avoid work. You avoid other people. You trick yourself into thinking that you can hide from reality. These are common reactions. The solution is not to beat yourself for all of this. The solution is to admit the truth: You just aren’t sure what you want right now and you aren’t sure how to get through this bad time.

THAT IS NORMAL. Be patient and accept that you just don’t know. Sit with uncertainty and try to tolerate it.

Beating yourself up for being lazy or entitled doesn’t serve any function. We are all lazy and entitled about different things. You can be living in a van down by the river and still be lazy about some stuff and entitled about other stuff. People get used to certain kinds of safety and reassurances and then, when those things shift or disappear, they freak out. This is true for everyone alive. We all feel unexpectedly vulnerable, or reticent, or stubbornly unable to change, or full of anger, at different times in our lives. We all veer off the road for reasons we can’t understand.

I have surprised myself with my capacity to work hard at times in life, and I’ve also surprised myself with my petty resentments and rigid resolutions not to move an inch out of my way. I have been expansive and open for long stretches and then retreated into long periods of wanting to hunker down and eat grilled cheese sandwiches and talk shit about everything that’s fucked about the world. I have become flinty and negative for long stretches. I have felt alienated and despondent and unmotivated for months at a time.

One of the hardest things about being a human is that you always, always, always hope that you’ll simply land in a place where things are just EASY. One day, it will all be extremely relaxing and fun. You’ll set up smooth, relaxing circumstances for yourself and then life will be fucking awesome.

That’s not how it is.

I woke up this morning and I felt overwhelmed. Last week was so good. I wrote a lot and I also got out of the house and did a bunch of fun stuff. But this morning, all I could think about were hassles and inconveniences and all of this pain-in-the-ass work I have to get done. Everything on my immediate schedule sounded like an enormous fucking drag.

If I wrote down the things that sounded like a drag, you would very likely laugh in my face and call me lazy and entitled. You’d say to me, “These things sound fun and interesting. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

But if you wrote down the things you hated at your job, I might have the same reaction. I might say, “This is an ideal job for someone your age. Your boss sounds cool. Your work sounds exciting and fascinating. What the hell is going on with you?”

Only one person needs to enjoy your work: YOU. Only one person needs to feel like your life makes sense. Other people’s reactions and opinions are irrelevant. There is no objective view of what is lazy and entitled, no matter how many idiots on the internet want to yell this at other people. It can be very fucking difficult to have a gigantic trust fund. If you ever meet a very depressed person and they turn out to have a trust fund? Case in point. There are a lot of very sad rich people out there. Believe it. It’s time for everyone to calm the fuck down about how happy someone with advantages “SHOULD” be. The truth is that it can be exceedingly difficult to find your place in life, to feel comfortable, to enjoy what you do, to make your life rich and meaningful, and to build deep connections to others.

And even once you manage these things, guess what? The world changes. You change. You want something different out of the blue. You feel shitty out of the blue. You can’t handle ANYTHING suddenly!

Everyone would love it if we could all just find the stuff we love the most, set up a life doing that, find the people we love, build a happy habitat, and stay comfortably ensconced there until the end of time. But the truth is much thornier than that. Most of us manage to get a little bit of what we want and we also struggle in other areas. We have great kids but our marriages are tough. We have the best boyfriend alive but our job sucks. We are suffering from a chronic condition but our careers are taking off.

We just need this one thing to be happy! And then… it doesn’t make us happy, either.

So I’m here to tell you that no, you don’t deserve to fail or to suffer. You don’t deserve to feel like a complete lazy, entitled piece of shit. You’re just a human being who’s doing her best. Even back when you were avoiding everything and freaking out, that was you doing your best to SURVIVE, motherfucker! You were doing battle with the scariest feelings on Earth! You couldn’t face where you were. You couldn’t face anything!

Feel some compassion for that. If you can’t feel compassion for yourself, that’s a very concrete thing you need to work on. I also used to feel ZERO compassion for myself, so I get it. You have to cultivate it. You have to break out of this mode of “OH GOD, LOOK AT EVERYTHING I FUCKED UP!” and you have to say, over and over again, “Jesus, that was HARD.” And try to really feel it.

If you want to be less avoidant when things go wrong, you have to learn to be (paradoxically!) very, very good to yourself in spite of your big mistakes. You can start by trying to tell a much more gracious and kind story about what you’ve been through lately.

You say you don’t know what reality is. That’s mostly a sign that you’re feeling extremely neurotic and self-blaming and you can’t accept anyone’s soothing words. You’re currently dealing with a very bad cognitive habit where you ignore your body and reject other people’s soothing words and tell yourself that you’re a failure over and over again. Your mercilessness towards yourself makes you more and more neurotic.

MANY MANY MANY PEOPLE DO THIS UNDER STRESS. The best, most important thing you can do right now is to break this habit and start to make your body feel better — more loved, more cared for, more soothed. In other words, you have to get vulnerable and soft and allow EVEN MORE ROOM TO BE MISUNDERSTOOD AS LAZY AND ENTITLED!!!

Smart, complicated, thoughtful, ambitious women find themselves in this neurotic, guilty, self-hating conundrum often, trust me. And the only way through it is NOT by punishing yourself more, by pushing your body past its limits, by yelling at yourself, “Snap out of it, you worthless, lazy piece of shit! Look at everything you have!!! Show some fucking gratitude!!!”

Nope. That’s not it. That’s what worked in college and high school, maybe. But there’s a point in your life when the strategy of ignoring your body and your feelings breaks down. That’s when you have to learn how to take care of yourself and love yourself, flaws and mistakes and guilt and self-hatred and all.

Right now I’m reading Lena Dunham’s memoir, Famesick. I strongly recommend it. In spite of seeming like this bold, brash, reckless celebrity, Dunham reveals that she’s actually a very sensitive, intelligent person whose shame and guilt and confusion and avoidance led her down some extremely harrowing paths. And the one thing that Dunham takes pains to describe to us is HOW HARD IT BECAME TO SEE REALITY CLEARLY.

That’s how it is when you blame yourself for everything. And even when everyone you love keeps saying, “You need to be good to yourself,” it’s so easy to say, “They’re just saying that because they love me” or “They’re forgiving me for being worthless because they don’t want me to fall apart even more.”

I’m telling you, smart, sensitive women who are ruled by shame and self-hatred have it very, very bad. We struggle not to tell ourselves that we are the ones fucking everything up IN EVERY SITUATION. We soak up all the ambient shame in every room. And there’s ALWAYS someone out there who will tell an intelligent, capable, talented woman who knows her own mind and stands up for herself that there’s something ABSOLUTELY SICK AND WRONG about her.

Maybe you don’t like Dunham. Look, there are plenty of random writers and stars and public figures I dislike, for good reasons and also for very bad ones. That’s natural. These things are subjective. We trust people and love them or we don’t. I’ve always loved Lena Dunham. I love her shows, I love her confessional compulsions, I love her books, and I feel sure that I would love her as a human being, too. I feel protective of her. And I’m very tired of how our culture reacts to interesting, open, unique women with lots of talent.

As a result, I don’t want to read any reviews of her memoir. I don’t want to read reactions to the reactions to the reactions to the reviews. Leave me out of the so-called conversation, because I don’t want to know. I’m reading her book and loving it and I feel proud of her for having the courage to write it. I think her book is a real gift to smart, self-hating women who ignore their feelings and their bodies and the words of people who truly love them in favor of random people who tell them that they’re complete pieces of shit.

Everyone on the planet can hate her and it won’t change my mind. I’m tired of reading comments about books by people who haven’t read the books in question. I’m tired of book reviews that boil down to a moral verdict about the author’s character instead of an analysis of what’s on the page. I’m tired of podcast interviews where an author is asked by someone who hasn’t read their book to address the opinions of a bunch of other people who haven’t read their book. Can we all stop being loud, opinionated assholes and just do a little reading for a change? If we don’t want to read a thing, can we maybe shut the fuck up about it instead of telling as many people as possible why we’ll never fucking read it no matter what?

I just want to enjoy the book she wrote, because it’s great.

Similarly, I want you to let go of what random people at that job thought of you. I want you to understand that some people out there will always hate you for reasons beyond your control. It really pays to accept that as much as you can. It is crucial that you let go of the idea that your job is to keep everyone satisfied, or that there’s some objective reality where you’re determined to be GOOD or BAD.

You are doing fine. Forgive yourself now and tomorrow and the next day. Wake up and forgive yourself over and over again. The more you forgive yourself, the more you’ll offer love and support to others that they desperately need.

It’s okay to be misunderstood. It doesn’t fucking matter in the long run. Keep believing in your big heart above everything else, and let people remain confused about who you are.

Believing in your big heart means that you can feel it when the people you love say

DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM. LISTEN TO ME. I LOVE YOU. YOU DESERVE HAPPINESS.

That’s my message for you AND for Lena Dunham, too. You deserve pure joy. You deserve to fuck up and then forgive yourself for it. You deserve to make even more mistakes without feeling shame over it. You deserve to show your brilliant spirit to the world.

Listen to me closely: This world still needs sensitive, smart women to feel free enough to express themselves even when it’s embarrassing, even when it’s weird, even when you fucked up and you’re sorry and you don’t know what to do next. This world needs you to take care of your body and your mind so you can share yourself with others without fear. This world needs your honesty and your vulnerability.

It doesn’t matter who likes you and who doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. Be exactly who you already are.

I was born this way: full of doubt, full of confusion, trying to put it all into words, trying to find a friend in a sea of judgmental strangers, trying to build something more tender and strange and hopeful than what’s already here. When I’m trying to build, when I’m trying to share, I can’t hide my ugliness or my mistakes. Everything shows. When I’m reaching out for other people who feel the way I feel, I can’t pretend to be above it all, or pretend that I never get hurt, or pretend that I don’t feel anger or fear, or pretend that I’m better than I really am.

So I have to let go of my shame. It’s a choice. It’s simple. I have a job to do that requires that I set my self-hating impulses and my guilt and my worry about other people’s opinions aside and I give ALL OF MYSELF anyway. It’s grueling to give so much, and it’s also bliss. It’s humiliating at some level, but it’s MY JOB.

In order to do MY JOB, I have to love myself as I am. I have to forgive myself for being this way. Other people don’t act like this, sure. But this is who I am.

How do you do that? you want to know.

Watch other people do it. Instead of feeling embarrassed for them, stand up for them. Say out loud: “I like that. I don’t care who doesn’t like it. That’s brave to me. I want to be more like her.”

Polly

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly! It fucking sucks to be brave these days! Do it anyway. Someone out there needs to hear what you have to say. Someone needs to know that they’re not alone.

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