I’m Chris, a 20-year-old Dutch & Polish guy. I happen to be quite emotionally unstable and lack empathy, and I hate myself for it, but I am good at hiding it.
I knew a young woman who tried to kill herself because she was bullied and seen as „strange”. I was best friends with the girl who bullied her into attempting suicide and tried to get everyone to stop talking to her because she was „disgusting”.
I have emotional instability so I sabotaged a relationship with a guy I had feelings for. He has a girlfriend now and I have moved on. I have anger issues and I destroyed the property of one of my friends too and yelled at them. Now they seem nervous around me but I can’t help myself.
Do you have a therapist you can talk to about this?
You are 20 years old. You can be anything from this point on. We can’t fix a damn thing about what we did in the past. We can just you know, help forge a better future. If people fuck you up, you can take a break from deep relationships. You can just have superficial ones, which are easier to manage. Idk where you’re at, but try to find something productive you can put a lot of energy into and take it from there. If you do something very technical, you don’t really need to bring anything but a simple respect for others to the table. You don’t have to talk feelings, or really at all outside of expressing logical thoughts. Idk what to say about the emotionally unstable part. I’m not a doctor, but I was once young. I am not sure if this still holds true, but I remember hearing your brain isn’t even fully formed until you’re 25. 20 is a good age to be anything, so like I said - just find something you can tolerate (or in theory enjoy) and do that and you’ll see the blocks start falling into place. Also if you can’t talk to someone, write. I mean you can write here, but I think you should just grab some paper and shit all over it. Just shit, and shit, and shit. Just take all your word goo and plop it on the pages. Make sure it’s somewhere you feel is safe and destroy it when you’re done. It helps a lot, I’d like to think. Also feel free to shout into pillows. I don’t do it, but I hear it’s the shit.
That’s a very low bar for ruining lives.
Consider that you have discovered a disturbing trend in yourself that you would like to address before it hurts more people… and also consider forgiving yourself while you work to be better.
As another said, therapy is a good idea, especially as you know one of the things you would like to address in that therapy.
It’s a long journey to be a better person, but not because it’s difficult to make progress. It’s long because once you’ve started, you develop the skills to continue being introspective and working toward your true self.
As someone who doesn’t believe in free will - and as you said yourself, you can’t help it - I’d say you’re not a bad person, but a dysfunctional one. There’s no point in being angry at yourself over something you effectively can’t control, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be motivated to change. Admitting the problem is a good first step.
