Curate, connect, and discover
"There's no thought crimes and no thought heroisms" is honestly such a good piece of life advice.
You could be having the most fucked up problematic thoughts 24/7 but if you treat people with kindness, the good you do is the only thing that matters. But if you have only the purest thoughts and all the correct beliefs, it doesn't matter one bit if you spend most of your time being an asshole to people.
ive found that partially treated mental illness can sometimes look to uninvolved onlookers like faked mental illness.
I always feel kind of uneasy when people who are apologizing say, "I don't even know who the person who did that was. They feel like a totally different person from who I really am."
Sweetie, I'm sorry, but you have to get to know that person. If this person you apparently detest on every level just occasionally hijacks your body and does something awful, your understanding of how and when and why that happens is essential to your ability to promise anyone else that they won't be on the receiving end of that.
It might sound a little backward, that the key to avoiding destructive behaviour is not forcibly repressing that detestable energy inside yourself. You can deny those feelings and force them into exile, but they're going to come back and take over sometime in the future when your defences are down.
If self-loathing actually got shit done, I'd still be in favour of it. Unfortunately, it's only good at satisfying emotions in the short run, so you can really feel like you're putting in serious effort. It's not a winning strategy if you want to genuinely change your behaviour or thought patterns or emotional responses.
Self-reflection is not supposed to be a lesson in flagellating yourself. It is more brutal and gentler, because it rakes over the twisted shards of what happened in your mind with the dispassion of an engineer assessing a bridge collapse and says, "What really happened here? How can we prevent it from happening again in the future?"
It's possible to get to know your shadow, but not be consumed by it. You could eventually feel able to turn over the rocks in your brain, and catalogue and understand all the things squirming beneath. The shame won't kill you.
And being able to understand your triggers and tells, spotting your brain taking off before it's completely left atmosphere, is an incredibly important part of that.