Internalized Shame: My Reflections

October 14, 2024

I had a huge epiphany a week ago upon writing this (October 7th, 2024). I had a burnout from writing due to two factors: One, I had a book I had to finish reading for an article I’m now beginning to write a review for (coming soon); and two, I couldn’t properly focus on another article I’m trying to write right now and I got very stressed over it.

I started shaming myself for not keeping up with the pace I had set for myself with one article per week, and I told myself that I shouldn’t be proud that I had written only 9 articles since July 2024 when I should’ve been well on my way to having 20 written by now. I was letting my fear of losing everything get in the way of being able to do anything. Regarding my fear of losing it all, that’s a topic for another time so I can give proper context to it in an article of its own and discussing how it can affect people and their mental health and how I want to bring awareness to it and solve it for both myself and others. I went into a catastrophic mindset (because I went through several intensely traumatic experiences both in my personal and professional lives which still affect me to this day and I don’t wish to pretend they’re not there, so I’m acknowledging their presence and finding solutions for my personal problems through therapy and for my professional problems through networking) and in a desperate frenzy, I wrote this post on LinkedIn below on October 7th:

“I’m feeling very sluggish and I don’t have much energy to work but I really need to work in order to make a living as I really need to be able to get career prospects NOW. Why do I need to try to create 10 to 20 portfolio pieces in order to be able to get any work and why should I have to break my back to do it all for free? I just can’t keep up with it all. I need people giving me projects to do with financial compensation, then I’ll do more work. It’s both exhausting and demoralizing just trying to do everything for yourself with no pay and no one having your back because it’s so easy to get demotivated.

Not to mention I feel a constant worry that I’m not going to be able to make enough money to live so I just don’t maintain the level of focus I need to create the quality of articles that I want to because I feel stressed, strained, and strapped. It’s not that I don’t want to put in the effort. It’s that I like to do things if there’s a tangible reward to it, and if there is no reward, then there’s no point to me doing it at all. I keep feeling like the world is against me and I find it impossible to overcome this feeling because everything I’ve gone through the last 9 years just confirms and affirms that belief.

I can’t maintain this kind of momentum forever. I feel so worried that I’m going to lose it all and that people are going to invalidate and belittle me. I really need to make connections but I dont know how to make the right ones, who to look for. I just don’t feel like I’m in the best space to write at a pace of one article per week. At the same time I need to write 10 to 20 portfolio articles in pristine condition ready for approval of the professional world or else my entire future goes down the drain.

I am tired of trying not to appear desperate when honestly I’m fighting for my ability to live life authentically and I won’t settle for anything less and it’s draining me. I still haven’t finished my website. Websites should be something that you push a few buttons and then its completely done in 2 minutes so that you can have the damn website done and then move on with your life. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I honestly don’t feel important. I never want to have to ever worry about money or being in survival mode again. I need to write 10 to 20 perfectly polished articles or else I have no future.

Unless some people just look at what I’ve written so far and ask me to do projects for them, I can’t keep this up. I always have to work so much harder than everyone else around me just to get little scraps of what they have and I’m so done with this. I just want a steady flow of writing jobs. I want to consistently be able to do work without being plagued mentally with of the consequences of what would happen to me if I don’t. I feel guilty and ashamed that I’ve only written 9 articles out of the 20 I’m supposed to write and have 2 in progress. I should have 20 now but I’m not fast enough and I need to be fast.”

It’s very true. I do get sluggish with my work and have low energy sometimes. I occasionally don’t even feel the motivation to work at all because I wonder what I’m doing everything for if I don’t get results out of it. I indeed need to be able to work in order to make a living as I really am trying to be able to afford my bills and food (I can pay my bills and as I am currently living with my grandmother, I don’t currently have to worry about paying for utilities. I’m currently living on food stamps and with rising costs of everything, especially food, my food stamps don’t cover all of the food that I have to buy every month and I have to pay for some of it with my disability benefits (I specifically get SSI - Supplemental Security Income - because that’s what I was able to qualify for)).

I’m also taking care of two cats and I make sure I get food and litter for them but I have to take them to get vet care or cat grooming at some point because currently I can’t afford vet care or cat grooming. Most of my money is spent on either bills or food. It’s an exhausting cycle I have to deal with.

I anticipate that when I finally get to live on my own that I will have to make a lot more money just to be able to cover my living costs as well as food and I would like to eventually be able to get to the point where I no longer have to rely on SSI or food stamps for income and I can make my own money and be able to live comfortably. I want to be able to be realistic about my financial goals and be able to plan long-term for my bills and food and housing in the future when I eventually do live on my own. For now, I am still living with my grandmother so I don’t have to worry about this yet. I want to be able to think about my living costs with a clear mind. My more immediate need is to be able to cover my costs where I live now while focusing on building my writing career, work relationships, and work prospects so that I can have a proper foundation for my life so I can be both financially secure and financially free.

I had the mistaken belief that I needed to have 10 to 20 portfolio pieces written in order to be able to find work or else my career prospects would forever be ruined. I also felt dismay that I would have to write some of these portfolio pieces without getting any financial compensation for them and I felt fear that I was not getting clients fast enough. I pushed myself to try to work much faster and much harder to get as many clients and projects as I could so that I could crank out article after article like a perfect machine, because I wanted to write as many articles as I could perfectly and completely polished and efficiently produced like a machine. I wanted to work like I was a machine because I feared that if I didn’t keep the exact same pace for each article I wrote that I wouldn’t be able to keep up my pace and I’d inevitably lose momentum. I have a compulsive mind that delves into obsessive thinking, especially when it’s related to my own self-preservation, although I feel in that case it’s somewhat justified, however, it doesn’t excuse the fact that I feel that I need to go at a faster pace than I can handle. I feel desperate for recognition and validation of my work and I feel deeply unfairly treated by the world because the world isn’t designed to accommodate the needs of neurodivergent people like me, so I have to have both short-term and long-term plans to accommodate my needs.

Because hiring discrimination has been such a fundamental problem for me in getting regular employment, all the work I’ve ever gotten in the past and present was through networking with people I know or with new people. Other than a nonprofit tech startup and maker space I worked in, I’ve been doing occasional freelance writing jobs on and off over a few years. However this isn’t enough for me to be able to provide for myself just to have a sporadic client send me a few small projects once in a while, especially because back then I didn’t know my worth as a content writer at all. I crave a consistent clientele and a regular income and the ability to not only live on my own but to eventually thrive living in other countries (as I have a goal to move out of the United States and spend the rest of my life living around the world learning and speaking many different languages in many different countries because I really want to intimately understand what living in other countries feels like from local perspectives outside of the English-speaking bubble) and I know that to build a proper foundation to be able to live and afford that kind of life for myself I need to cultivate the right relationships to make that dream life of mine happen and I need to be able to offer what I can personally do for my clients.

The point is I had so much shame built around not being where I wanted to be at a certain age (living a financially independent life in my own place in Europe, particularly somewhere like Germany, by age 30 with a successful writing career and a loving partner) that I kept putting myself through the same cycle of pushing myself too hard and burning out and feeling ashamed for it and expecting myself to be perfect. Then self-doubt crept in and stifled me in its grasp.

I then added a comment to the post with some final thoughts, venting out my complete frustration as to express how I felt society cheated me out of being able to have good career prospects through a mixture of the social stigma against disabled people working and through selling the idea that one can succeed in life if they just work hard enough and bootstrap themselves.

“Why do I need to do all this extra work just to get career prospects when I was told in school “If you study hard and get good grades you’ll get a good job for sure!” and then when graduating “If you work hard and are constantly productive you’ll get a good job for sure!” Well that was a LIE. Here I am 11 years after I graduated from college STILL unable to get consistent work and constantly worrying about how I’m going to make money and get the right contacts and all that when that’s something I should’ve completed and perfected years ago. I just want to be able to work in something that I love without worrying about money. I really don’t know how people can get so lucky and be able to get a ton of work and live comfortably without working nearly as hard as I do. I feel cheated, wronged, and screwed over by the system in my desperate attempts to beat it. I feel lost. I should have a lot more articles out by now and I should’ve finished one last week. I also hate that my articles aren’t as polished as I want them to be and I still am trying to figure out how to make the Beehiiv newsletter website work and I didn’t get the logo for it ready yet. Ok I’m done for now and I apologize for this rant.”

The worst thing I could’ve done when I wrote in this muddled frenzy of desperation was apologizing for my rant and thus apologizing for my feelings and my own desperation to have a better life and to fulfill my dream of being a self-employed content writer, researcher, and author. I apologized for my own very valid feelings of being wronged by society, of repeatedly being discriminated against in hiring on the basis of being neurodivergent, I apologized for my own trauma of having gone through repeated rejections to the point of putting a wall around myself and not reaching out to anyone about my work prospects for fear of being rejected again. I apologized for my own fear of making mistakes, and then most importantly, I even apologized for existing. In that moment I realized that I had internalized the belief that I was a mistake.

I am a mistake.

That thought had been persistent in the back of my mind for years and years banging at its door begging me to address it but because I was completely unconscious about it I wasn’t aware of it until it made myself known. I had always felt the belief that I was a mistake, but I didn’t perceive it until I made myself reflect on why I was so apologetic for everything, why I was so perfectionistic, why I kept worrying about what everything else thought to such a degree that it made me lose trust in others. I am my own harshest critic and it shows in the belief that “I am a mistake”. I had such a damaged sense of self as a result of this deeply internalized shame that it had to have stemmed from a combination of environments: My childhood, my school experiences, and my work experiences. I strived for so long to be someone who could do everything by myself because I was told at a very early age that I’d never learn how to read, write, speak, cut with scissors, or function in society, thus I set out to prove that person and all of society wrong by constantly trying to achieve something bigger and better just so that I could be seen as a person.

It got to the point that as long as I did everything right, ticked off all of the boxes society wanted me to achieve, then I could attain full personhood if I just could be good enough and good enough had to be perfect, no room to make mistakes at all. I needed to be an ideal person in order to even be treated by society as a human. To be an ideal person I had to constantly be productive and sacrifice everything else for the sake of a greater future. As long as I worked for that ideal future, for that great reward in the future, I had to put everything I enjoyed aside because if I tried to focus too much on what I enjoyed without first achieving my goals for the future, then I’d be wasting my precious life and time not doing everything for the future, because everything had to be put aside until I attained my future. Otherwise if I didn’t tick off the boxes and do everything I was supposed to do, I would be a failure, and being a failure was bad, wrong, shameful and never acceptable. If I were a failure, I felt, I must be a fundamentally flawed person and I could never change, and only bad and tainted people could be failures, therefore if I was a failure, which I could never be because failure was wrong, then I would be a bad person who deserves to fail. I didn’t realize how shame-based this mindset was and that I don’t have to be like this to myself.

I need to be allowed room to grow. I need to be allowed to mess up and make mistakes. I need to be allowed to accept that I’m a person with flaws and imperfections and that flaws and imperfections are okay. I need to be allowed to not constantly be productive, sacrificing everything I enjoy in the present for some future goal. I need to be allowed to give myself grace and compassion. I need to be allowed to trust other people to help me. I need to be allowed to prove any naysayers wrong in a healthy way. I need to be allowed to give myself permission to heal and live life in my own terms and at my own pace. I need to be allowed to give myself periods of rest and celebration and the opportunity to actually enjoy life rather than just pushing through it. I need to be allowed to be authentically me.

I am NOT a mistake.