Our inability to forgive ourselves for our mistakes is often based on a strong sense of how easily they could have been avoided in the first place. We incessantly review our blunders and errors, contrasting what actually occurred with what could have been avoided if we hadn't been so foolish and naive. At the juncture between the agonizing present and its now-vanished alternative, we experience recurring jabs of pain: we should never have written that email, we should never have become involved with that person, we should have paid more attention to the advice, and we should never have borrowed the money...
Along with the suffering, there are questions: why didn't we have more foresight? Why couldn't we be more self-controlled? How could we have been so obnoxious? There are no realistic, much alone kind, ways to respond to our harsh self-interrogations from this close quarters; as a result, they are likely to continue in misery indefinitely.
At most, we will decide that we messed up because we were greedy, vain, shallow, intemperate, and weak-willed; that we messed up because we are lusty, harebrained, immature, and egocentric. As we compare our soiled life to the perfect choices of others, our self-hatred will grow even stronger. They had it right all along: they didn't succumb to temptations, stayed steadfast and dutiful, kept their priorities clear, and paid proper regard to public opinion.
The overarching conclusion is that we are all terrible individuals who should probably kill ourselves right now (depending on the severity of the problem). We'll have to find a different strategy if we want to escape endless self-loathing or suicide. We can't always justify our errors by pointing to some minor weakness in our personalities.
We must rely on a significantly more comprehensive and objective response. We messed up because we are human, which means that we are members of a species that is driven by its very nature to navigate life without the knowledge and experience necessary to ensure goodness, wisdom, kindness, and happiness. We may rue this or that blunder, but from a safe distance, we are fundamentally blind, and as a result, we are condemned to make mistakes of varying severity at some point. We have no way of knowing who we should marry. We don't have a perfect understanding of where our true abilities lay, let alone how the economy will perform, therefore we can't decide what kind of career we should pursue.
We can make educated guesses about what actions and settings might be risky, but we can't know where the genuine risks are ahead of time; landmines are buried everywhere. In some cases, assumptions established in one era may turn out to be incorrect in another. We can be caught off guard by rapid shifts in social norms: what was once acceptable can become indecent a few years later.
We may have certainly encountered a particularly jagged edge of life that has damaged us in a unique way. Despite the fact that the wound is limited, harm is nearly endemic. It might have been predicted from the beginning that something horrible would happen to us at some point, not because we are particularly defective, but because human brains lack the required matter to guide us flawlessly through the decades-long obstacle course of existence.
However, because we refuse to think about chance, our self-disgust is heightened. We compare our current situation to that of others and come to only one conclusion: we must have been dumber than they are, and our personalities must have been more corrupt than theirs. But, in doing so, we overlook one important explanatory factor: despite our defects, we may have had to deal with a particularly cruel twist of fate. There have been people who have been just as hasty or irrational as we have been who have (for the time being) sailed on unmolested.
Events have put a greater strain on the weaker aspects of our personality. Anyone who had been put to the same test as us would have failed in similar ways. When judging our fate, we must remember that the forces of bad luck play a significant influence.
At the same time, we harm ourselves by comparing ourselves solely to people above us rather than taking a holistic view of our situation. We look enviously at those who are currently riding high while failing to consider the hundreds, if not millions, of others who have faced fates as bit as harsh as ours. The human situation has rarely been happy; we should not add to our difficulties by refusing to contemplate all those who have cried just as much and lost even more than we have. We shouldn't keep equating ourselves with persons who, while superficially comparable to us in terms of age or educational background, had drastically different psychological beginnings in the end.
They didn't have our mother or father, they didn't have to go through what we went through, and they didn't have to deal with our emotional immaturity. They may appear to be our equals, yet they are actually part of a more fortunate group. We should cultivate sympathy for ourselves based on a fine-grained understanding of the precise burdens we were forced to bear.
A sense of regret can be beneficial at times: it can help us assess our mistakes and avoid the worst of the problems in the future. Runaway self-hatred, on the other hand, serves no practical function and is a masochistic luxury we can't afford. We may be stupid, but that doesn't make us particularly bad or odd; it simply confirms that we are members of the human race, for which we deserve unrestricted respect and compassion.
Image used from unsplash
Learning to forgive ourselves is the first step to freedom. When you learn to forgive yourself, you can now move on to the things that will make you life better. Dont be so harsh to yourself.