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I was in The Powerpuff Girls fandom years ago as a teenager. I had a crush on these two villains in a gang. One was the leader. The other was his punching bag. I explored my feelings for both of them in depth and realized that more than anything, I wanted the leader to stop hurting his second-in-command. Even when he screwed up, he didn't deserve that. And I knew that canon was never going to fulfill my wish because it was played for laughs. So I asked myself why I wanted this so much and what I could do about it. I realized these characters were resonating with the part of me that set goals and critiqued how well things were getting done, and the part of me that actually had to do the work and got punished when their results weren't good enough. I took a hard look at the leader's punching bag and thought "Snake's ugly. He's lazy. He's a coward. He has a horrible attitude and bad habits. He says the wrong thing a lot. His posture is even worse than mine. And I love him and wish Ace would appreciate him. How can I justify forgiving someone with all those flaws and have no mercy for myself?" Seeing a reflection of this character who was always getting beat up in myself and getting the other half of that dynamic to promise not to do that anymore was hard. Most people, I think, reject and repress the idea that they could be bad people. The thing I couldn't bear to own up to was being victimized. Feeling powerless was something I associated with a part of me - a small and devalued part. In trying to feel like my bigger self had control over abuse, I perpetuated it. Self harm was never a physical thing for me. But it was tied up with believing that hurting someone for failing was an appropriate response, was training, not abuse. If this was an okay thing to do, then I had every reason to set my standards higher than other people's and discipline myself until the only one who ever had a problem with my behavior was me.
To be honest, though, picking who would enforce rules I didn't make was a very limited choice. I hated not being powerful enough to resist coercion entirely. I was humiliated. Shamed. And displacing all of that burden onto a part of myself that I could hurt, rule over, and refuse to identify with, was wrong. It also didn't work very well. The more I tore any of myself to bits for not being good enough, the less capacity I had to meet my expectations. But that's sort of a meander away from what I meant to highlight, which is that the part of me that got kicked around had access to memories that the rest of me didn't, so making myself empathize, respect, protect, and talk to it has been key to understanding stuff I otherwise wouldn't know. This was a choice that had lasting, significant consequences for me. I made it for what seem, in retrospect, like extremely trivial, whimsical reasons. Yet my emotional investment in those two (objectively unremarkable, stereotyped) characters gave me the stubbornness to change a very ingrained habit. Beating myself up was, at least in the world's eyes, an admirable, acceptable use of power. It gave me a sense of regaining control that I craved badly whenever I was freaking out about unmet expectations. It's difficult to overstate how hard and scary not doing that anymore was. But I stopped feeling like my critical voice was me and stuck to my guns as fiercely as I wished someone would to defend abused!character. Sometimes I was holding onto resolve by my fingernails. I had no idea if I was doing the right thing, but looking back, I think being as unconditionally kind to myself as I could stand to be eased some otherwise intractable emotional issues, like my anxiety.
To be honest, though, picking who would enforce rules I didn't make was a very limited choice. I hated not being powerful enough to resist coercion entirely. I was humiliated. Shamed. And displacing all of that burden onto a part of myself that I could hurt, rule over, and refuse to identify with, was wrong. It also didn't work very well. The more I tore any of myself to bits for not being good enough, the less capacity I had to meet my expectations. But that's sort of a meander away from what I meant to highlight, which is that the part of me that got kicked around had access to memories that the rest of me didn't, so making myself empathize, respect, protect, and talk to it has been key to understanding stuff I otherwise wouldn't know. This was a choice that had lasting, significant consequences for me. I made it for what seem, in retrospect, like extremely trivial, whimsical reasons. Yet my emotional investment in those two (objectively unremarkable, stereotyped) characters gave me the stubbornness to change a very ingrained habit. Beating myself up was, at least in the world's eyes, an admirable, acceptable use of power. It gave me a sense of regaining control that I craved badly whenever I was freaking out about unmet expectations. It's difficult to overstate how hard and scary not doing that anymore was. But I stopped feeling like my critical voice was me and stuck to my guns as fiercely as I wished someone would to defend abused!character. Sometimes I was holding onto resolve by my fingernails. I had no idea if I was doing the right thing, but looking back, I think being as unconditionally kind to myself as I could stand to be eased some otherwise intractable emotional issues, like my anxiety.