The Suffocating Weight of Self-Blame
Why do we take responsibility for everything? And how do we stop?
When I was a kid, I hated ball sports. Kickball, in particular, was my nemesis. I was always picked last for the team in P.E., and for good reason: When the ball rolled towards me, I would panic and, more often than not, whiff it entirely.
As an adult, I can, thankfully, avoid ball sports. But there are other grown-up things I’ve never been good at or enjoyed, including hiking and bicycling. My ex always loved cycling, and when we were first dating, I joined him on a few cycling tours of Manhattan and Brooklyn. But I could never control myself on a bike, and my fear of being hit by a car made these experiences absolutely terrifying. Hiking is another sport I don’t particularly enjoy — I am always last in the line, struggling to keep up and stumbling around.
My whole life, I’ve interpreted these preferences and limitations as personal failures. I can’t control my body well enough. My clumsiness felt like a burden for others, too — the kids on my team that I inevitably disappointed, my outdoorsy athletic partner, friends who yearned to go on hikes with me. I internalized a lot of self-blame and shame.
Then, about five years ago, my son’s developmental optometrist gave me an eye exam. When I was a child, my eyes crossed; I wore lots of eye patches and eventually, my eyes straightened.
When the optometrist finished examining my eyes, he said:
“Do you not really like bicycling? Hiking? Ball sports?”
My jaw dropped. “I hate all of those things,” I said. “How did you know?!”
“Well,” he said, “your eyes don’t work together very well.” He explained that, because my eyes crossed when I was a kid, and they were often not looking at the same thing, they sent confusing information to my developing brain about what I was seeing. My brain figured out that the best solution was to only pay attention to the information coming from one eye at a time, rather than allowing both eyes to work together. Not only did this limit my field of vision, but it also meant that I didn’t have much depth perception, because depth perception relies in the information coming from both eyes simultaneously.
“Without depth perception,” he said, “it’s hard to discern certain things. Like the rapid changes in terrain you encounter while bicycling or hiking. Or when a ball is coming at you quickly and you have to react.”
In that moment, I felt such a deep sense of validation. I think I started crying. There was a real, physical reason why I wasn’t good at these things. My clumsiness and my preferences weren’t personal failures; they were not things I “should have” been better at; they were a direct result of physical limitations that weren’t my fault.
The information freed me of so much shame and self-blame. To this day, it’s hard for me to explain why. I mean of course there was something different about me that made me dislike these sports; why did the fact it was a physical limitation, that there was a biological reason for it, make me feel so much better? It’s unclear, but the whole experience made it clear to me how cruel I had been to myself for so many years. How I’d unfair blamed myself for something that was out of my control.
Recently, a good friend of mine had a similar experience.