When you're doing battle, you gotta learn how to heal quick. That's how I put it, because talking to strangers each day was hard enough without feeling shitty all night when it didn't go well.
One of my survival tricks was learning not to care so much about what people thought of me. It took a long time, and I still work on it.
The things I said to myself
This is me being real. I'd be like, fuck that person. Or my favorite line: I don't care. I don't give a fuck.
They might have been nice. I said that too. I already felt bad, and worrying that they could judge me made it harder. I was trying to find a way to move on.
Another thing I told myself was that they were going to forget about me in three days. They weren't going to remember this. That was what I said to myself.
Did that mean I couldn't cry myself to bed that night? There was a good chance I did. I had a lot of bad days. I was doing this by myself, trying to work out what helped.
What did I mean by saying they would forget?
In that group call, Crimson said something that had helped him in retail: telling himself he wasn't important enough to be on other people's minds. I understood what he was getting at, but I wanted to change that wording.
I didn't want to say I wasn't important. The thought I had used was that the other person would forget the encounter. I brought it back to the line I had told myself about three days. That was how I talked myself through the worry about what someone else thought of me.
I had to change the way I treated myself
I also used, “It's too early in the day to hate yourself.” Morning or late at night, it was still too early. That was a crutch I used to stop talking shit to myself.
Forgiving myself was hard. I wanted to talk well so badly. I was trying hard, and I needed to be kinder to myself while I was learning.
I kept working. This is what I did to get through those feelings while I was out there trying. Maybe it'll work for you too.