That's my point exactly!

You are so hard on yourself. Which I am too so I get it. I have a friend who is a psychologist. Once when I didn't have a therapist and was having a bad time he asked my to make a list of why I hated myself. It was like 7 pages long. Even I was surprised. I think it's a bipolar thing; I think it rips your sense of who you are away and leaves you trying to fill it in with faulty information gained while sick.

One of the saddest thing I have been left with from my career is that my brain has cataloged every time I ever messed up and those are the times that I remember more than the times when I was really good at what I did or that I did something extra for someone. I had some really amazing success stories. Somehow those don't matter anymore. But instead I'm tormented by memories of the worst things that happened. That was what started this episode, obsessive thinking about that which turned into my being really mean to myself. I caught myself calling myself stupid out loud over candy crunch saga in front of my 4 year old niece who thinks stupid is a bad word and realized I was being nasty to myself all the time. The thoughts of failure kept building. I thought it was because I had to put my national certification in retirement status this year but I did that and it didn't change anything. Some of it is things I didn't even do anything wrong, just the patient didn't like me for whatever reason, usually something that was not my fault. But I'm obsessed with it. I haven't worked in almost 4 years ago....

It's all the bipolar. It's evil. It takes over every thought when it can and it's hard to fight back and get your real thoughts back.