Procrastinating and scrolling through YouTube the other day, I stumbled upon an interesting video from my favorite fake news site: Buzzfeed. Immediately, I scrolled away, but the headline was just too interesting to ignore the clickbait usually associated with its "news": "If You Talked To People The Way You Talk To Yourself."
The main character of the video, Ally, contemplates the titled question from her friend and undergoes mental simulations of speaking to people as she would herself. We see examples of her hypothetical absurd cruelty towards her friends: "Wow, you cannot do anything right." "Your parents aren't proud of you." "Everyone you went to high school with is more successful than you." Eventually, Ally says something along the lines of, "wow, maybe I should be nicer to myself," as the video descends into comedic and somewhat satirical self-help talk.
But this naturally raised the question for myself as well, and my initial unabated response was holy shit. People would certainly believe me to be an abrasive asshole. My negative internal monologue goes something along the lines of: "Get your **** together, you ******* failure. Do you even want to be good?" I even had to heavily filter and censor what I say to myself in this article since it's usually laced with profanity (every other word) as a self-motivating tool. As Ally realized in the video, the self-afflicted cruelty can be a little absurd, and I would slap myself if I ever said anything resembling "you're a failure" to any friend. This exercise points to a pretty self-evident conclusion: we tend to treat ourselves far worse than we do other people.
Unlike Ally, however, I certainly reached no conclusion that I should be nicer to myself. I pride myself on being a trustworthy friend and family member who can be relied on, as well as someone who will never take out my frustrations on anyone but myself. No matter how ridiculous it sounds, my logic is that, no matter what, I am at fault for all my shortcomings. To blame anyone else for a shortcoming that was in my control is fatalistic thinking in my mind.
That doesn't mean there aren't flaws to that logic: I take other peoples' criticism too seriously to heart and I have a lot of trouble saying no to people when they ask me for favors. But the worst thing I could possibly do is to hurt someone else with my sometimes maniac aggression. If there needs to be a target and martyr, then let it be me, because I'm pretty used to taking it.
For example, the other day, I promised my roommate that I'd put his laundry into the dryer before bed that he needed the following morning. I completely forgot to do it, causing him to need to use wet clothes the next day. It was a minor situation, but I proceeded to curse myself out internally for not being a good friend, and still need to find a way to absolve myself of this soul-crushing guilt.
I'm also not advocating for internal abuse of yourself for self-improvement, but I also believe it's very important to have very high expectations for yourself. Make ambitious pipe dreams for goals, and claw and scrape your way to get them. Even if you fall short, observing your growth is astounding at the end of the day. It will humble you and make you respect, and even fall in love with the process of whatever you try to achieve. Unfortunately, it'll also make you realize where your limits are.
But that's just the path I resolved. Back to the point: what if you, reader, talked to everyone like you talked to yourself? Imagine how they would react or feel? I am certainly not an expert therapist or psychologist (although I wanted to before). It's an interesting and thought provoking reflection.
When you realize how you treat yourself, what are you going to do about it?
