The Unspoken Weight of Living Under Your Own Scrutiny
Why sensitive, capable people suffer in silence.
I want to introduce you to someone. Meet 26 year old me.
Neat little life in Paris. Fancy corporate job.
Serious about work, cheerful, an eager learner and a high performer.
All attributes confirmed by every annual review.
Or at least, this is what was visible to the naked eye.
On the inside, my inner world looked more like this:
Frequent nightmares, constant catastrophizing, and a crippling fear of messing up.
All hiding behind a large “please don’t be mean to me, I’m a nice girl” smile.
Looking back, I have to admit that the French corporate space could be quite punishing for a young, sensitive person. My biggest fear was doing something that would make me the target of a sharp, sarcastic comment, in front of everyone.
The humiliation, I imagined, would be unbearable.
In other words, I was afraid of shame. Which was funny, because shame was an emotion I was already well acquainted with.
The tiniest mistake would send me into long and painful spirals.
One copy/paste gone wrong and my week-end was ruined.
I’d scan my manager’s mood every morning. The output of that scan would determine my vigilance levels for the rest of the day. He was a fun and competent guy, but man did he enjoy the occasional lashing out. I’m talking screaming lungs, scarlet face, big fists hitting tables.
To stay safe, here’s an inventory of the thoughts I used to believe:
You’re not rigorous enough.
You’re not good at paying attention to details.
You triple-checked that file and still missed this. How dumb are you?
You’re a fake engineer. Everybody knows it.
Are you sure you want to ask this question? Shouldn’t you already know?
The nicer you are, the less likely people are going to be mean to you.
You’re going to be discovered as the fraud that you are. Any minute now.
It never occurred to me to question these, or to offer a more generous interpretation. In fact, I firmly believed they were the only way to keep me on my feet, and get me to perform and improve. “I’m a lazy, distracted person.” I thought, “If I relax, I’ll mess up spectacularly.”
And that idea was scarier than death itself.
So I filed self-compassion under “finding excuses for myself” and never reached for it for the following four years.
Did this harshness help my performance? I’m sure it did. But at what cost?
Would you buy a potato for 10.000$? Unless it had magical power, I don’t think so.
Especially if you can make a decent french fries bowl for 3 bucks.
8 years later, I’m now convinced that I payed an absurd price for something I could have gotten sooner and through a much calmer, more forgiving path.
It took things getting really bad to finally realize that it didn’t need to be that hard.
If you saw yourself in my story, if mistakes trigger punishment for you, I want you to know something: it’s not your fault.
Nobody taught us how to treat ourselves better. Nobody even knew what was happening inside of us. Not even us.
We never learned that self-flagellation isn’t a prerequisite for success.
These things weren’t in the curriculum.
Do I regret going through all of that? Not really. I’m not big on regret. What’s the point?
However, I know today that self-compassion is a crucial skill, no matter how cheesy it sounds. And I do wish somebody had taught it to me much earlier.
We can learn to do better without beating ourselves up.
If any of this sounds familiar, I’d really love to hear about your experience.
And if you recognize yourself here, I want you to know this: it doesn’t have to be this hard.
That’s why I’ve been working on something with you in mind.
It’s a short mini-course called Stop Beating Yourself Up.
It’s designed to help you change what happens after you mess up.
To move from immediate self-punishment to a more supportive response you can actually use in real life.
I’m currently wrapping up the last modules, but for the next 3 days, you can already pre-order it at a special price right here.
If this is a pattern you’re tired of repeating, I think this will help.
Rooting for you, always ✨🩵
I love that you started this with a photo of your outfit. I remember talking to a french girl on my NLP course. She told me that a successful career in corporate Paris was as much about how you looked as how much you knew. She said young men and women spent most of their wages on outfits, shoes and grooming. I found that fascinating 💕
To carry such weight, and still learn tenderness, this is not a small journey. Here you are absolutely right that self-scrutiny masquerades as discipline, while slowly eroding the nervous system.
A gentle but powerful reflection.
🙏🙏