Is There Something Wrong – or Am I Just a Very Miserable Person?

We can spend a lot of our lives angrily focused on just how hopeless and awful many things are: this report someone has sent us, the way our partner is with us, the hotel room we’ve just checked in to, the way a friend is being… But at some point, it may transform our sense of reality to let in a hugely challenging but in the end possibly highly redemptive thought: ‘What if the problem were first and foremost not with the world, but with me? What if I wasn’t overwhelmingly surrounded by idiots and fools, threats and insults, dangers and disappointments but was instead – above anything else – simply and poignantly a very miserable person?’

It isn’t – naturally – entirely pleasant to have to redraw our self-image in this way but once we do so, we stand to come to a much clearer picture of what is actually in front of us, we can direct an appropriate amount of care and compassion at our wounded, suspicious and fearful selves and we can aim eventually to improve the quality of our judgements and interactions with others. 

Imagine that we have started to have doubts about our partner. We worry about a silly thing they said at dinner, we feel that we don’t have much fun together any more, we wonder whether there might be better people out there, we get irritated by the way they clear their throat or close the fridge… But before we call time on (yet another) union, we might pause to ask ourselves a deceptively simple question that may help us to sort out the accuracy of our feelings in this as in other contexts: ‘How often do I feel comfortable around anyone?’

In other words: ‘How unusual is this particular feeling of being dissatisfied, irritated and restless? Is it limited to this partner or has this shown up with other partners too?’ The way to improve our judgement is to explore how common a way of passing a verdict is for us; and we can say, the more common it is, the more we should cautiously explore how appropriate it might be in a specific setting. Before giving up on someone, we should ask ourselves: ‘How satisfied am I ever with anyone I’ve ever yet happened to meet? And indeed, with anything I’ve ever yet come across? How normal is it for me to be happy not just with a person, but – let’s say – with a hotel, a new watch, a book? Are there any similarities between how I am feeling about my partner – and the complaints I am prone to direct at countless other situations in my life?’ 

We might as a result pick up on an overall melancholy and querulousness inside us that is likely to operate across the board, that finds fault in almost all contexts – and that could, once we spot it, lead us to have second and more forgiving thoughts about our current partner’s apparently unmasterable flaws of character. A person who properly knows that they are seldom happy with anyone has the option to look with greater benevolence at a relationship in which things feel (once more) less than perfect.

Or if we wake up panicking in the early hours after a decision we’ve taken, rather than simply listening to our fears reverentially, we might ask: ‘How often do feel this way? How often do I panic about other things in a relatively similar manner? And how often have my intense feelings turned out to be accurate guides to reality? Is there something specific to worry about here or is my mind perhaps intent on engaging on a very habitual manoeuvre: grabbing on to something to alarm itself with?’ We can wonder kindly whether our perturbance might be stemming more from something long-standing in us than from anything especially threatening in our outer circumstances.

Or imagine that we are feeling extremely frustrated with a colleague and have become convinced that they will never be able to help us. But to look more benignly at our irritating fellow employee, we might take a moment to wonder: ‘How often do I assume that no one can help me? How often do I feel that everyone else is a fool? And when I do so, how much do I ever in fact try to explain myself before giving way to a resentful sense of isolation? Am I actually so isolated or do I simply quickly feel so very fast?’

Or late at night, we might grow certain that our life is in a dreadful state. One option is to double down on the exploration of apparent catastrophe. Another is to wonder: ‘How often do things feel very gloomy after 9pm?’

By exploring the frequency with which a given emotion crops up, we stand to become more aware of historically-created biases that are open to nuance:

— X seems to hate me; but how often do I think people are not on my side?

— It seems Y is doing it on purpose: but how often do I assume that harm might be deliberate?

— I fear I’m going to get into great trouble with Z: but how often do I worry that I’m going to be badly  punished?

— I feel guilty about something that I’ve done: but how often am I tormented by a sense of sinfulness?

Through interrogations into the generality and frequency of a given emotion, we can take some of the pressure off a present verdict. We can discover that there may be something smeared on the lens through which we look out at the world and which distorts much of what we are seeing – and may have more to do with a mindset built up as a result of certain relatively uncommon and painful events in our formative years than with anything before us now. We keep re-seeing what once was – even where it may now not exist. We keep having to believe that people are unkind or that a terrible threat awaits us, because this was once what we faced. The beginning of better, more hopeful judgement begins with squaring up to how oddly prone to misjudgment we are – on the basis of how sad, fearful and yet also mercifully unrepresentative our early experiences may have been. By addressing the misery in us, we can discover a far more benevolent reality out there. Hope can spring from an initially hugely difficult thought: we don’t live in an unbearably miserable world, we may just have grown up (for extremely forgivable reasons) to be very miserable people.