I was really surprised the other day to find out that I’m a hardass. Now, I know I’m incredibly judgmental, and because I know that, I work really hard not to be because it is borne out of my own insecurities. It’s not fair to be a real hardass to other people based on my own perceptions of failure.

What surprised me, though, is how much I am a hardass to myself.

I’m sure we all are to a certain degree, especially about specific issues like body image, career success, and financial stability – our society’s bugaboos that keep people awake at 3 a.m. with a sense of critical system failure. Tragically, it’s pretty common for people to think “I’m not good enough”.

But that’s not true, though. We are totally good enough, just as we are. Which is easy for me to say, but I never saw how little I put that knowledge into practice.

This all comes off a week where I procrastinated on gradschool classwork; I was (am!) behind due to getting profoundly sick with the flu for two weeks, and I was intimidated by the work and readings that had piled up in the meantime. I felt like I was doing nothing all week, and the guilt was crushing.

During that week, I wrote thousands of words of original fiction, cleaned the house, rearrange furniture in the front room, set up my new computer system…well, you get the point. I was hardly unproductive by any definition of the word. But I was only giving myself credit for what I had not accomplished, and that is a longstanding lifetime habit.

People have called me an overachiever, including my own therapist, but I don’t see it. I don’t see it because I am too busy being a hardass and getting on my case about everything I have not managed to get done.

It’s a bad day when you see how terrible you are to yourself.

I don’t think I can steer around this issue by convincing myself that I do enough, or that I am actually fairly productive. It’s not a matter of arguing with myself, because the problem is that the whole fucking premise is wrong. My issue is not being stuck somewhere between overachiever vs. underachiever, it is completely outside of that continuum: it is about valuing myself as a person, for who I am, just as I am.

Productivity is good, and I like accomplishing things. I will always be an overachiever, because part of me enjoys it. But it should not define my worth, and I cannot ever get to a point of truly loving myself (ie not being a hardass) if I don’t simply accept myself at the most basic level as a person who is worthy of being loved.