I find that saying cruel things to yourself is often a simulation of what you expect from other people, in a way as an attempt to inoculate yourself against expected disappointment. But really it just breaks you down before you're even in a situation where someone can be cruel to you, and the self-simulation is infinitely meaner because 1) it knows your weaknesses intimately and 2) you have an emotional investment in taking yourself down, whereas others are only as mean as their self-interest
this is a really good and insightful point, and maps neatly onto what I’ve noticed about the difference between deprecating talk that comes from me vs what comes from my friends vs what comes from strangers.
for me, the last is easiest to brush off. people have always been unkind to me, and I’ve never much cared what they have to say. whereas anytime my friends say something even halfway mean to me I lose my entire sense of self for a few hours. I have good friends and they generally aren’t out to hurt me, but I also tend to parse things as mean or unkind even when they aren’t meant that way.
but the stuff I say to myself sticks, and it genuinely horrifies me because I am out to make myself feel worse and succeeding pretty well at it - because I know what I’m doing. also, there’s something unnameably awful about writing a vent post and thinking of tagging it with something like ‘shut up u dumb overdramatic bitch’ which is just. I thought that. at myself. I feel sick.
