It's early Saturday morning, and I'm on Zoom with a bunch of unruly humans in what I think of as the pajama circle. I'm snacking on a breakfast burrito while others sip coffee and tea — fully come-as-you-are. About ninety minutes into our two-hour session, one of our more stoic members starts spiraling. Money is tight, regrets are piling up, and catastrophic outcomes feel like they're closing in.
She's doing what too many of us do when we're struggling: she's turning on herself.
"They told you it was a six-month contract," she says, mimicking the voice in her head. "Why are you so stupid? Why did you think this would work out? Are you dumb or crazy?" She'd never say that to another person — only to herself. "I had this great opportunity, and I just blew it."
It goes on like this for a while. For the record, the "great opportunity" is a small severance she received after being laid off from a company she'd worked at for many, many years — not a winning lottery ticket.
I ask if I can ask her a question. "Sure," she says, which I take to mean: I'm going to hate this, but since I pay you to support me — yes.
This thing you're beating yourself up about, I say, this terrible thing you did to yourself — do you know what was actually driving you? What were you doing when you were acting against your own interest?
It takes time to unravel it. She'd believed, based on a lifetime of generally upward-trending professional experience, that things would work out okay after losing her job. But after a year-long series of truly unfortunate events — the severance gone, the temp job ending, nothing feeling okay — she's holding herself up against some fictional version of the story where everything went differently. Ideally, even. That's just not what happened.
It's a waste of energy to be recreationally cruel to yourself. And it absolutely absolves you of looking at the real problems.
That's where I start. It's a big swing, but it's just a start — there's a lot of ground still to cover.
THE VOICE THAT SOUNDS LIKE ACCOUNTABILITY
Here's the thing about that voice — the you dumb ass, you blew it voice. It sounds like accountability. It feels like accountability. But real problems exist in the world, real problems on our plates, and as long as we spend our energy self-loathing for sport, we aren't solving them. Self-loathing is a coping mechanism. It's a protective part that says, "Well, as long as I'm being hard on myself, I must be doing the work." But we're not. When we do that, we are not actually solving the problem.
WHAT WE WERE NEVER TAUGHT
We weren't taught to build and trust community for support. We were taught, on purpose — in our schools, through our parents' lives, even in the movies — that we can't lean on one another, that we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and succeed at work to be okay. (Capitalism enters, stage left.) It was the milk in our bottles, the air we breathe. It shapes how we see ourselves in hard times like these.
We learned to blame ourselves, not the systems that failed us.
Now we have to unlearn it all: relearn that everything we were told about how you get to be "successful" just isn't true. It doesn't work anymore. Honestly, I'm not sure it ever really did.
On a personal note, my own mom is proof of this. She gave twenty-four years to the military and another twenty to the electric company. Counting Social Security, that's three paychecks worth of a working life. And she still can't afford her own care — she has to rely on state assistance. She's not even asking for that much. This is broken. It's so broken. We simply cannot believe we are failures when these systems are what failed us.
EIGHT CENTS
Back to the circle. When she tells me she's used up her savings and has nothing left to fall back on, I do the math out loud, on purpose, a little ridiculously: "You had fifteen cents, and you blew through it, and now you feel like a dumb ass. That's all they gave you — fifteen f*cking cents in the big picture of the world."
She laughs and corrects me: "Eight cents."
"Okay. You got eight cents in the big picture of the world, and you blew it. You bought… what is that math? Bubble gum."
Because that's the actual scale of it. Whatever cushion any of us gets handed in a situation like this will never be a real safety net. We are never going to be made whole by eight cents. So the math of you-should-have-known-better doesn't even hold up.
WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
Now what? We do whatever we have to do to be okay — same as we did a year ago, same as we will a year from now. And we remember: we are loved, and supported, and connected, whatever happens. The one thing most of us are actually wealthy in is people who care about us. So trade self-loathing for honesty, and ask for the support you actually need right now.
Because love is the only thing that will solve this. Love and care. Though we have to be careful what we mean by that — love isn't babying a grown-ass adult. Real love sometimes has anger in it. Real love moves mountains. It doesn't have room for recreational cruelty, yours or anyone else's.
We have choices here. We have to make better ones than self-loathing, because self-loathing gets us nothing in return.
P.S.
A few weeks later, this client tells me the word "recreational" itself bothered her—she thought I was saying she was having fun with all this self-loathing. I meant she'd done it casually, without really considering the consequences — the way you'd never treat someone you actually care about.
And she names the real distinction better than I did: hating yourself while emotionally shut down is what makes it recreational. It's careless. With your heart open, the same self-reflection is useful — you can take the criticism, you can hold the feedback, because it's coming from somewhere that can actually carry it. We have to be grounded, open-hearted even, for this kind of personal reflection to help at all.
If you got this far and thought, "I wish I had support like this,” reach out and book a private session here.