Ten people can tell you that you did something well.
Then one person says:
"I didn't like it."
And somehow, theirs is the voice you take home.
We rarely do the same with praise.
We don't lie awake wondering:
Why did they think I was good?
Did they really mean it?
What if I'm actually better than I give myself credit for?
Yet one unkind sentence can occupy our minds for days.
Perhaps that is because criticism does not arrive alone.
It searches for something already living inside us.
Someone says:
"You're not good enough."
And we hear more than those four words.
We hear an old teacher.
A parent who was difficult to please.
A comparison we never quite forgot.
A failure we still feel embarrassed about.
Or perhaps the voice we gradually built from all the voices that came before.
Some words, after all, find doors already open.
That may also explain why praise can feel suspicious when it contradicts the story we have learnt to tell about ourselves.
If some part of you believes you are unattractive, someone who finds you beautiful may seem merely polite.
If you don't quite believe you deserve success, achievement can easily become "luck".
And if you learnt that your value lies in what you do for other people, being loved when you are doing nothing for anyone can feel strangely uncomfortable.
We do not always receive other people's words as they are.
We pass them first through what we already believe about ourselves.
So perhaps the problem is not simply that people fail to say enough kind things to us.
Perhaps we have built an internal courtroom that cross-examines every compliment while allowing criticism to walk straight through the door.
None of this means criticism should be ignored.
Sometimes there is something in it worth hearing.
But there is a difference between asking:
"Is there something here I can learn from?"
and asking:
"Does this prove all the terrible things I have quietly feared about myself?"
The first is reflection.
The second is a trial.
Every now and then, perhaps we should examine the evidence from which we built our idea of ourselves.
Not everything we were told was true.
And not everything we came to believe about ourselves began in our own voice.
— Malek Ayoub