How I am dealing with not feeling good enough

tags:: #output/post on/happiness

I find myself not taking at face value that I'm a "good person" all the time, noticing my tendency to give things to people or help them out. One of the worst things that can happen to me is when someone refuses my help. This is just something I notice in myself—it's very difficult to prevent.

Here I wanted to describe some of the things I'm doing to help overcome that.

Good friends who show love openly. My dearest friends have absolutely no problem showering the people they care about with love, and I love to do that back. We hug a lot, say "I love you" a lot, and generally look out for one another. This is huge. When someone knows this about you and dearly loves you, they will push you over and over until you see you're an amazing person and this is an experience I wish to every single person facing similar challenges as I have.

Therapy. I went to therapy for a while and after talking about my problems—my therapist ended up concluding "well it kinda sounds like you're doing pretty okay, to be honest." It was a big relief to hear someone who I could trust for their judgement about being a "good person" and who is independent, say that all is actually quite good in my life. I kept going for a while and one of the things we did every time was just take some time to reflect on what's going on in my life and making sure I noticed the good things.

Jar of Awesome. I have a list with by now more than 10 years worth of compliments people have given to me. From time to time I scroll through it or let an LLM analyze it. Gets me to tears every single time.

Setting goals, low enough. I'm the kind of person noticing dissatisfaction if I didn't complete my to-do list by the end of the day. But no to-do list doesn't give me satisfaction either—so the best thing for me is to make a plan in the morning where I also take a few seconds to decide "you know, if I ONLY get to this one thing, I'm actually allowing myself to be proud of what I did today."

Trying again. Trying again isn't a sign of failure, it's a sign of perseverance. Everyone fails, not everyone tries again. It's okay.