Tripping on shadows.

[Brawlrus]

So, I go through this in my mind, daily. I think back to every meaningful relationship I've had with a person, starting with my mother. I feel as though they were each headed somewhere amazing, until I came along.

I honestly feel like Donnie Darko, most of the time. I feel as though I could live a half decent life, but at the expense of others being miserable. I'm not suicidal; on the contrary, i want to live an amazing life, but I feel I'm cursed to make people miserable.

I want to be the good guy, but what kind of superhero can you be, when your power is sucking the life energy out of anyone near you?

I could explain it further and provide anecdotal references, but suffice to say that sometimes I feel like I should have been the business end of pro-choice.

[Rostov]

Wow, that sounds like a really horrible way to feel. And to be honest, I wonder whether some strangers posting on an internet forum are the right people to help you with it. If you genuinely think that you've made everyone around you miserable and are likely to continue to do so in the future, it sounds to me like your thoughts and thinking patterns and ways of interpreting events are very badly skewed, and I think counselling is almost certainly the best way to go.

 

I think it's likely that you're misinterpreting and misremembering, and drawing entirely the wrong conclusions.

 

You're almost certainly not a super-human. You're just one ordinary person, and your relationships with other people are just one relationship that they have with one other person. They have many more, with many other people. To be frank, you're not a supervillan and there is only so much damange you can do to so many people without meaning to. It sounds to me like you've got a very inflated view of your ability and influence to make people happy or unhappy. As well as everyone else they know and have a meaningful relationship, there's every single decision they make for themselves. You're the centre of your own story, but you're only a co-star, a guest star, or an extra in everyone else's. Google the "spotlight effect" - this is a tendency that we all have to overestimate our own importance and the extent to which we are being watched and judged by others. I'm not special, you're not special.

 

You're probabably focusing only on times when you think you've made people unhappy, and not on the times you've made people happy. This tends to be particularly true of child-parent relationships - you tend to think of the times you've got it wrong and hurt them, and not the times when you haven't, and have brought them great joy in ways you almost certainly don't know about. Google 'Dunning-Kruger effect' - while this is about how the skilled underestimate their skill and the unskilled overestimate, I think it can also illustrate how we take for granted or grossly underestimate the good things we do for people, and focus only on the times when we don't bring happiness to those we care for. And once you're primed to think of negative moments, availabilty error creeps in and that's all you think of.

 

I wonder also if you're confusing things you're responsible for through conscious and deliberate action, and things you're responsible for through no fault of your own, perhaps just by being there or existing or fate or accident. Or, in other words, things you're not responsible for.

 

Thing is, though.... while I think you're almost certainly objectively wrong about making everyone around you miserable.... if that's the way you feel, that's the way you feel. And even if it's not true, if it feels true to you that's a horrible place to be in, and you have my sympathy. I won't say I know how that feels because I don't, but I think most people have at least some experience of feeling utterly useless and that the world would be better off without them. But I think if your thoughts are in that kind of dark place, and in that kind of spiral, it's very hard to get out of alone. So if there's any way you can access some counselling, I'd strongly recommend it.

 

I hope you're feeling better about all this soon - please try to remember all the things that you've done to bring joy or pride or happiness to others.

[Brawlrus]

Thanks for the reply. I just get in these moods, where I ponder my existence.

It's not that I directly cause people problems and I'm certainly no narcissist.

I look at the relationships with people and have one of those "It's a Wonderful Life" moments, where I imagine where their lives would have been, had I not been in them.

For instance; My dad tormented my mom. He put her in the hospital, raped her on several occasions, beat her all the time and that mental abuse was even worse. That led her to drinking more and doing serious drugs. In the end, the drugs ended her life(coupled with copd).

Had I not been born, she would have parted ways with my dad, early. She wouldn't have had anything anchoring her to him.

With my gf; We got together and her roommate didn't like me being around all the time, so she was forced to move, which led to her subletting another place while at school, but the company forgot to have her sign the lease and the other roommate of the one she sublet from, hadn't known about it and decided he didn't want her there, so she had to move, immediately. That put her in a beat up little converted garage with horrible landscaping, which led to her slipping and breaking her leg, having to wait awhile to graduate, etc. All of that could have been avoided, if she hadn't been with me.

 

I know people make choices and you never know what could be at the end of a path not taken.

I'm sure there are instances of me having a positive impact that i'm simply unaware of, because for some reason, the darkness shines so much more brightly than the light, in these times.