Dear gj:

You wrote that you are supporting your parents and a sibling. If you didn’t have that responsibility, life would be easier for you, much easier, wouldn’t it. With the thought that three people depend on you, the consequences of you not performing your work well enough and the consequences for possibly losing your job seem much greater than if you were only responsible for yourself.

When parents and society instill into a child the belief in being responsible for them, that belief is very strong. I want to introduce to you an idea: I believe that you are not responsible for your parents or for your sibling. I wish you believed it too. Your mind and your life would be better for it.

You wrote: “My mom says I have everything a person my age needs”. Clearly she is wrong. You  need freedom from false responsibility. I wish she allowed you that freedom by not instilling in you this sense of responsibility.

Another point: you wrote referring to your flaws, “these flaws are visible to anyone easily if they look. How do I overcome the shame of who I am and know I will make it”- when I was full of shame I believed everyone else was perfect and they could all see how imperfect I was, how deeply and overwhelmingly flawed I was. When I saw other people looking at me I thought they were thinking about how flawed I was and I felt very ashamed. It was a painful way to live.

What I learned in the last few years is that no one is perfect and that almost everyone is concerned with how flawed they are, having their own voices in their own heads telling them that they are not good enough. Some of these people take breaks from those voices telling others that they are not good enough, but then they go back to telling themselves the same thing.

We only imagine we know what other people are thinking, imagining they are thinking what we are thinking. We only imagine other people are focused on us, on how flawed we are. In reality, most people, if not all, are focused on themselves most of the time.

Do post again, if you’d like, anytime.

anita