Defeatist Things I've Told Myself

"You'll never told down a job." In my early thirties, it has become increasingly clear to me that I'm bad at keeping jobs, well, fast-paced ones anyway. People just don't seem to want to keep me in them.

"You'll always be too fat to be attractive." Well, as I've lost weight and looked increasingly thinner, that's been proven not to be true. I guess I'm just intimidating, which is not at all comforting.

"You're too crazy to live a normal life." I've been taking my meds every day and night as directed. I haven't overeaten in a while. I haven't even gamed in a long time. I know to put life first.

"You've had too much of a miscarriage. You can't reproduce." I don't really focus on this too much lately, and I don't let myself dwell on it. I don't buy into it either.

"You'll end up a crazy cat lady." Down the road, certainly not now, I'd like to have a functional relationship. Id on't relish the thought of a cat's eating my brain once I'm dead anyhow.

"You'll end up a bag lady because of your yelling bouts." Crazy people who yell in their apartments can't keep a place. They end up homeless, living out of a bad (hence the term "bag lady"). I've been able to decrease them. I hope to remove them, or at least decrease them enough to live on my own.

"Men don't look at you when you're receptive. You might as well give up." I can't afford to give up because I'll feel ugly all the time because I'll have given in.

"Women look at you more than men do. You might as well give up." I don't like women that way, and I'd like that respected.

"The man you fell for didn't choose you. You might as well give up." I'm not going to give up on myself as a person just because the man I love didn't choose me. My future just won't include a man romantically. I can still have a job, a place, a home eventually. I'll just have my future with one or two cats instead.

"Your smarts don't show up on paper. Could be you're not." I know I'm smart, competent. I can accomplish what I set my mind and efforts to. I know four languages, can sing, and used to play piano. I also can cook and would marry myself for my cooking.

I can say a lot to demotivate myself, to put myself down. But, there's evidence to the contrary. I can use that as an affirmative statement about myself.

With all the negative things that other people, even loved ones, say about us, plus what we say to diminish ourselves in our own eyes, it's easy to give in to all that and not even try. But if we did that, none of what we do would get done.

We are the only ones who can say if we move forward or back. We decide if we let someone worsen our day and what we think of ourselves with the bad things they say. We decide if we buy into those negative things enough to say them to ourselves.

Kicking our own butts never did us any good. It never encouraged us to move forward. We can demoralize ourselves into staying still, but we shouldn't. We have to tell ourselves the things about ourselves that motive us to say, "You can do this," to ourselves and mean it.

We have to remind ourselves of what we're good at, what we know we can do. Those, to me, are honest affirmations. No false positives.