do you have any advice for getting oneself to brush their teeth more without just collapsing into hating oneself every time they fail to do it?
i cannot stress this enough: stop hating yourself. it's never going to serve you and it will only make your life worse. do everything in your power to stop hating yourself. obsess over this. think about it every hour of every day until it changes. talk to and listen to yourself like a kind friend or mother or therapist. invent a different voice in your head that wants to love you and will kill the one that hates you. ask yourself questions as to why you hate yourself and unpack why you do something so needlessly mean and self-aggrandizing. keep asking yourself why. take criticism in stride. every day you spend hating yourself is a day you spend dead. don't rob yourself of your life only to wake up one day realizing you spent most of it being cruel to yourself for no good reason. forgive yourself. get over yourself. it's a beautiful thing that your life is privileged enough such that the way you treat yourself for not brushing your teeth twice a day is a source of strife. you owe it to yourself to eliminate that source by simply not being an asshole to yourself and simply brushing your teeth every 12 hours. better yet, brush your teeth every 8 hours. if you miss one, no big deal, you already brushed twice. but the most important thing is not hating yourself. it is a stupidly fruitless thing to do to yourself
self-aggrandizing doesn't mean what i thought it means! i can't remember of the word i am thinking of - perhaps narcissistic.
to fixate on your failures so much that you outright hate yourself is to inflate your own importance in manners that harm you and the people around you.
in my experience, the type of person that would "collapse into hating themselves every time they fail to [brush their teeth]" is the kind of person that is unpleasant to be around NOT BECAUSE OF THEIR FAILURES, but rather simply, BECAUSE THEY HATE THEMSELVES.
if you are like this: it's not your fault.
almost everyone i know would forgive you for being like this. you hate yourself because you do not forgive yourself when you fail because you do not believe you can change because every time you fail you think it is proof that you are not changing because you do not forgive yourself because you hate yourself. it is an infinite loop.
you cannot stop failing. nobody can. you know that. the only way to break out of this is to forgive yourself and stop hating yourself because you simply do not have to. once you understand that
if this wasn't a comedic exaggeration, it speaks heavily to me. i used to hate myself. i have known so many people like this. most of them are tma. we are conditioned to hate ourselves. we are groomed into trying to kill ourselves.
if you are like this - it's not your fault.
even if you contribute to it, or enable it to continue, or feed it more hate - it's not your fault.
failure is relative to the confines of the scenario. something can only fail based on the framework of where it exists. an absolute success in basketball is an utter failure in golf. you are in charge of your framework. no one else. nobody decides what you are or what your failures look like except yourself. you were probably raised in a framework that told you, constantly, that you were failing. this is not the only framework. this is not the one that needs to exist inside your mind. it can be anything you want.
almost all people i have known like this are obsessed with their own failures BECAUSE they hate themselves. everyone fails. i fail. the difference between you and me is i forgive myself when i fail because i choose to do better next time.
i do this because i love myself. i am a scared, resilient, black sheep of an animal that woke up in an overwhelming world full of beauty and cruelty and love and fear and i put on a brave face. if evil exists, i know what it looks like, and i know i am not that. if there are parts of me that are bad, i know that they do not make me bad, only flawed, as all things can be depending on the framework.
are animals capable of being "flawed?" an animal kills another animal when it didn't have to. an animal tortures another animal. are these animals bad? a plant overextends itself and dies. is it a failure?
i know i am good because i decide what i believe good is. nobody can take that from me. like myself, it may change, and still i carry it with me. it keeps me alive - truly alive - alive in a way i never was until i stopped hating myself.
because i love myself, i enjoy taking care of myself. i brush and floss my teeth twice, sometimes three times a day because i want to nurture myself. you want to be nurtured, right? you want to be looked after by someone who loves you, yes? would you bathe a person you love? would you brush the teeth of a person you hate?
you do not hate yourself because you fail. you fail because you hate yourself.
first, you hate yourself. that's how you start. you've been doing it for a very long time. probably longer than you have any reason to. no child should hate themselves. then, the child grows up hating themselves more and more with every failure that they are made to fixate on. they do not believe in the celebration of their successes because you do not celebrate the accomplishments of someone you hate.
forgive yourself for what you do wrong and comprehend what you do not need forgiveness for because it is not you that made you this way.
