The other day at my intensive outpatient program we did an exposure exercise. Each of us took a piece of paper and wrote down a fear about ourselves, and then we folded them up and slid them to the person next to us. Then we held our partner's paper in our hands, not opening them, for two minutes. For the first minute I felt nothing. Then at one point the group leader said, "Now look at the person across from you," and when I heard the words "Now look," my whole body felt like it dropped thirty stories down an elevator shaft because I thought she was about to tell us to open up the pieces of paper, and I was as filled with sheer terror as I would be if I went sky-diving, probably. I've been so afraid of what I wrote down on my paper for twenty years that it's taken over my life, off and on, and been the engine that has propelled all my other mental health problems — anxiety, depression and mood issues, eating disorder symptoms.

This deep, chronic anxiety centers around a shadowy concept that I've been afraid of for decades but can't quite name: that I am somehow… unacceptable. It has lots of different aspects and versions: a fear of being morally corrupt, evil, "a bad person," or crazy in a way that makes me hurt people; a fear of being physically repulsive or disgusting; a fear of being secretly an embarrassing outcast that nobody wants around, or so delusional and different from other people in a bad way that everyone can see except me (I frequently have the intrusive thought that everyone can hear my worst thoughts out loud, or that I'm in a bad version of the Truman Show that everyone is hate-watching); or even the fear of being somehow inexplicably just not a person, almost like a robot or an alien impersonating a human but not having real feelings or real experiences or deserving real kindness — being somehow fundamentally invalid as a being. The term "fear of abandonment" has never quite resonated with me; I feel certain that, no matter what crazy crap I do, my mother and best friend will always be there for me. But society feels, to my anxiety, liable to universally shun me and ostracize me at any moment, for no reason. I'm afraid of rejection by the group. 

One thing we talk about a lot at IOP right now is this idea that human beings evolved with a fight or flight nervous system to avoid fatal threats like snakes and tigers and bears, but that now we have lots of small, non-fatal social threats like being rejected romantically or getting negative feedback at work or someone getting mad at us on the street, but we still go into full fight-or-flight mode about them because we, as one therapist always says, "haven't gotten a software update." Although I do agree with that in many ways, I think that the idea that this is some maladaptive behavior seems not quite right. The fact that we treat romantic rejection like a venomous snake is the software update. Evolution uses what is available to it to use, and when it needed a tool to get us to pay attention to social dynamics as we were evolving into a social species, what it had available was the central nervous system. And it worked. Every individual that was chill about getting rejected was more likely to end up alone and was less likely to survive. It was the neurotic as fuck ones, our ancestors, who gossiped and listened to rumors and freaked out about what people thought of them, that were successful. 

Of all these related fears, the one that tangles me up the most is the fear of being "a bad person," and I think it says something about the evolution of my personal morality that this is so inherently tied up with the idea of being accepted by the group for me. "Goodness" as a concept is a weird and mushy confusion of the ideas of being ethical and the idea of conforming to norms that help us belong. I know this intellectually. I know that what really matters to Adult Me is to be ethical and to have a few strong relationships where I feel accepted. But somehow, I can never shake this fear of getting suddenly, globally rejected because I'm "bad," and in particular, bad in some way that is biologically inherent and unfixable. 

So let me try to follow this fear downhill. As my therapist might ask, what is it covering up? Let's say I'm pathologically selfish and narcissistic; couldn't there be some use in my personality still? Let's say I'm attention-seeking and self-absorbed; I can still make stuff that gets me attention and also helps people, and donate money to charity, and hopefully pay higher taxes to give families a good safety net. What happens then? Maybe I'm too hurtful to be in a relationship; I can't be married or have a long-term partner. Maybe everyone shuns me, even, and I'm some scarred figure walking lonely across the landscape. But I can still have my apartment, my food, my tea. What happens then? What if I hurt somebody? I do my best to make it right and not repeat it. I apologize, learn, make amends, move on. But what if I do it over and over? I keep being honest with everyone, myself, my friends, my psychiatrist, and I change my life so it doesn't keep happening. But what if I do all that and still am hurtful, cause problems for people in my life? Then I have done the best I could. There is no amount of moral you can be and be completely certain that you will never hurt people. 

I saw a TikTok recently that said, what if most people are doing the best they can most of the time? I think there is a huge sadness in realizing that people are basically doing the best they can, and still, the world can be horrific. I’ve seen so many people hurt each other so much and so often with the best of intentions. That have hit each other, thrown plates at each other, burned each other's hair, threatened each other with suicide, demeaned each other, called each other disgusting and ugly and stupid and worthless and then made fun of each other for thinking that was a problem or that that could be traumatic. And yet. Did it because they were hurt and didn't know how to communicate maturely. Did it because they had been physically violated and so didn't understand physical violation was not a normal part of life. Did it because, after all the physical hurt, they didn't realize hurtful words even counted, or that emotional safety in a relationship even existed. 

There is such childish comfort in this fantasy that there are people who are victims and people who are perpetrators and the two categories never overlap: you are either one or the other and you'll never be in danger of slipping into the other category. The truth is, although most victims don't become perpetrators, I believe that perpetrators have always been victims. That doesn't mean victims don't deserve complete safety, healing, and protection. But perpetrators are often, and most unfortunately, people doing their best from the behaviors available to them learned from the perpetrators who hurt them.  I've done so many things I'm not proud of. I've been selfish, made other people responsible for my needs that I should have taken care of for myself, lied or hid things out of fear, said weird and inappropriate and offensive and hurtful things. I've interrupted people and shared too much and assumed I'm right about everything. I sometimes don’t think about how things I do might affect the people around me, especially when I'm feeling deprived, emotional, burnt out. 

This is basically what I wrote on my piece of paper — the pieces of evidence that my anxiety has that I am truly, unfixably bad, sociopathic, narcissistic. My instinct for such a long time has been to hide all of this from everyone and myself. But the antidote to harm isn't shame. It's changing things for the better, the first step of which is facing reality. The only truly dangerous thing is to let shame win, to keep everything hidden, to not ask for help.