You Know Yourself Too Well

I was watching an interview with a celebrity I admired. He was the person I wanted to become. Then the interviewer asked him: "If you were given a time eraser that let you go back and remove any moment or mistake, what would you erase?"

The interview kept going, but I drifted into a daydream, like Walter Mitty. I started wondering how I would answer if someone asked me the same question. In my head, it set off a long chain of erasing: every moment I hated, every person I never wanted to meet again, every mistake I had ever made. Halfway through, I looked at what I'd left behind, and there was almost nothing. No highs, no lows, no stories. Strip away the bad, and somehow the good goes with it. All I had left was a flat, empty line. So I stopped, and called it a silly question I'd never answer.

Then I forgot about it. For a long time, I never asked myself the real question: why did I want to erase so much of myself?

Now I think I know. We start wanting to erase ourselves when we look at ourselves through other people's eyes. We don't stop to ask whether those people are fair, or kind, or what is going on in their own heads. We simply copy their judgment and turn it on ourselves.

And that hurts more than anything they could do. Other people judge you for a few minutes, with very little information. But you live with yourself every second of every day. You know every detail, from head to toe. So every time you look in the mirror, you like yourself a little less. Some days you want to peel off your own skin and tear out every flaw they ever pointed out. You can't. So you give up, and sometimes you even make things worse on purpose, so that no one will bother looking at all.

That's the problem. So what should you actually do?

Three very different people put it better than I can:

"If you don't care to be liked, they can't touch you." — Naval Ravikant

"Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you." — Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones

"No matter what you do, someone will always be unhappy. You can never please everyone everytime." — Priyanka Chopra

Two things are worth remembering.

The flaw is not in you. It lives in a society obsessed with comparison, where every bitter critic thinks they are the standard of perfection. When someone mocks your body, they are really showing you what they dislike about their own.

You cannot silence the world, and you shouldn't try. People will talk no matter what you do. So the next time you stand in front of the mirror and want to peel off your skin because some idiot commented on your double chin, stop and ask yourself one question: Is this something I would love to change, for me? If the answer is no, let the comment go. If the answer is yes, change it with patience and kindness, like caring for a garden, not burning down a house. Go to the gym, not to escape their eyes, but because you have finally learned to look through your own.

I don't want the eraser anymore. Every mistake, every person, every moment I once wanted gone is part of what turned a flat line into a life.