People tell depressed teenagers to “not compare yourself to others” but it’s kind of hard to do so when you’ve grown up being compared to all of those around you, that you’ve been told time and time again that you where in fact, not good enough. When you are told you should have “been more like Kattie” or “normal kids your age are able to do this, why cant you?”, you learn that you’re not good enough, that you will always compare yourself to those around you. You learn to have extremely high expectations of yourself, that your too stupid to be a normal child. You start to hate yourself and things about you at a young age, knowing that because you aren’t smart enough or good enough.Â
That you grow up thinking that your stupid and that your interests won’t ever mater, that you don’t matter. That you don’t matter as much as the smart kids or kids that get all A’s, the kids that get praise, the children that you grow up thinking are better then you because they are smarter then you. That you start to learn these things and think them at the ages of seven and eight.
All of this leads to teenagers depressed teenagers who constantly compare and put themselves down because they themselves do not believe that they are in anyway good enough. That because people are able to achieve much more then them in means of grades that they are smarter and better then them. This leads to depressed teenagers who need constant validation and have no idea how to accept praise, who don’t know how to take criticism without getting defensive due to the fact that they spent their life being belittled by those who they where told to look up to
