All my life I’ve struggled with this feeling, probably related to trauma-brain, that other people are judging me. That person you just met thinks you’re annoying, my internal narrative will say. Or, your friends are getting really tired of you. Of course I know logically that this isn’t true, and also that it’s its own sort of narcissism; the idea that everyone I know is thinking about me, all the time, that I am the center of their internal worlds. For these reasons I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to combat this tendency to assume that others don’t like me. No-one is thinking about you! I tell myself. But the struggle has felt Sisyphean at times; I can logic myself to death and yet, at the end of the day, the internal voice is often still there. Don’t text that person asking to hang out, they think that you’re a burden.
Recently (finally, thank god) I’ve had a sort of breakthrough with this. I had this stunning realization that I’ve never actually cared what other people think about me, that what’s always been important has been what I think about me. And whenever my internal narrative is making assumptions about what someone else thinks of me, that’s actually just what I am thinking about myself at the moment. And if I take that as a clue! And really lean into it, I can get to the root of why I think that about myself, and then poof! My assumption that the other person thinks that about me disappears.