What gives me the right to compare my experiences to theirs? We’re not the same person. So when I associate with people who are actively going through a period of depression and are struggling to get up, surely, all I have to do is say “If I can do it you can, too” to inspire them, right?! Wrong. So I force myself to get up, I switch into autopilot, and I accomplish my tasks on a strict schedule I’ve set up exactly for this reason. But I also have a superhero complex, and my terminally ill partner needs me to care for him. I have days I don’t want to get up, sometimes I go weeks to months in a reclusive state and don’t talk to anyone. But I simply have a chemical imbalance that is separate from external stimuli.

Later in life, I would experience other factors that contributed to this, like medical issues and abandonment. I have since I was 8 years old and had a conversation with my mom wherein I told her, in the only way I knew how, I didn’t think I felt what I was supposed to and how I mimicked how others acted (like if something happened and people around me responded joyously, I’d mimic this behavior). Like many others, I struggle with depression. And then creates self-doubt in people who have yet to accomplish the thing – What’s wrong with them? Why can’t they do the task so-and-so managed to do?

So how could one single person think that their life experience is the end-all-be-all of experiences to the point that if they managed to accomplish a difficult task, anyone else could also? It’s absurd if you think about it logically. The choices we’ve made, the people we grew up with, our socioeconomic class, our genes, injuries, traumas, successes, achievements, talents, everything. But, in my opinion, it’s just another level of everyone’s favorite game of “who has it worse.” Don’t you hate that? You have a rough day and you’re venting to a group of friends and one of them says, “You think you’ve had a rough day? Let me tell you about my morning!” And then it becomes some dick-measuring contest of whose day was worse when you started the conversation by just wanting to rant about some asshole at the 7-11.Īll of our lives are so different.

I get it, people want to be an inspiration or be inspired. At some point in our lives, most of us have either said or been told “If I can do it anyone can” and I’m here to tell you why that can be an incredibly harmful statement.

Let me tell you why that's bullshit