THREAD: What was your most formative put-down or criticism?
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THREAD: What was your most formative put-down or criticism?
The art teacher who told you your drawings weren't good enough, the schoolfriend who asked why your nose looked like that....
Most people have one. That throwaway phrase or comment somebody dropped on us, maybe at a formative age, that still lives, echoing and rebounding in the confines of our brains without ever paying the rent.
Can you trace any of your modern-day insecurities back to a previous insult or piece of feedback you received? In what ways has this influenced your life and your actions ever since?
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Eep, I wish I'd tried to write my own answer before asking this actually, because now I'm realising this is kind of HARD to respond to. Note to self about content creation - always road test it yourself first! 🙈😂
For the longest time I've carried around a terror of the label of "weird". It was crippling me through my teens, twenties and early 30s - growing up my sister called me it frequently, and to me it meant I was failing at life. Failing at belonging, at being 'normal' and right and wanted and good. My self-weirdness radar was in constant overdrive scanning mode - picking up on all those tiny moments of social interaction where I could tell I'd misstepped or and beating myself up (both figuratively and sometimes literally) afterwards for hours on end. Which, if you think about it, is pretty effing weird 🤡.
I even bought a book full of rules about how to be great in social situations, which was full of dazzling advice like "ask everyone what they'd like as their epitaph on their gravestone!". Yeah. You can imagine how helpful tips like that are to a 21 year old uni student lol.
One day I was speaking to my coach about this whole thing and said, "I feel like everyone else was born with a rule book that I didn't get", and she said, "are you kidding me? That sounds AMAZING! Lucky you!". It kind of blew my mind to look at it with this fresh perspective. I'd never really appreciated before how much all the rules for 'normal' and 'proper' are just a massive social trap. Between that and my work and my experiences of loving acceptance, I'm much less afraid of being weird these days. Sometimes it does still come up though - and it's interesting to see who triggers it in me, and notice it's always the hyper-'normal' people, who I have little in common with, who always intimidate me the most.
I got teased for ‘looking like a boy’, as I had short hair as a child and to me, that meant ugly. I never thought I was pretty and no one ever told me I was. Whatever the mirror, or photographs show or what others tell me now, deep down, I ‘know’ I’m ugly. And although I was slim as a child, now that I am not, I now get to be old, fat and ugly.. I say this not for sympathy or denials - my psyche cannot let go of the beliefs that grew when I was little. Now, I tell my children that they are beautiful and gorgeous and lovely and amazing all the time so they don’t grow up thinking they’re not 🥺