Here's part of a fb post from Sam Ovens, who is worth 20 mil, and is a business consultant....

"1. The Self Illusion
In business there’s one enemy you will come up against again and again. This enemy will make you question yourself and doubt your every move. It’s like a dark force that has you by the heels. A monster that’s breathing down your neck.

This enemy is you.

When I got started in business I was shy, awkward, clueless, poor, horrible at managing money and had no idea how the world worked. I believed this was “me” and it paralyzed me from taking action. By far the biggest challenge I had to face was loosing myself, my character and my identity of who I was.

Society has phrases like “Be yourself”. “Stick to your roots”. “Don’t forget where you came from”. Have you ever stopped to think about who you really are? Where is this thing you call the self? The self doesn’t exist, it’s merely you clinging to an identity built up of stories about the past.

It’s been my observation that the only way to achieve success is to become the person who deserves it. When we become this new person we are no longer ourselves. You see, this is the issue with our understanding. We believe we are something when we aren’t anything.

To succeed in business you have to change who you are. You have to constantly evolve. This is impossible when you cling to your identity and believe you are the way you are. You have to slaughter your self image.

Instead of answering the question “Who am I?” Try answering the question “Who am I becoming”. Decide who you need to be to be successful and then grow into that new character. All the worlds a stage and we are merely actors."

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so...

Does it even make a difference if I suddenly recognize that I was raised in an isolated home with some physical arguments between parents, psychological warfare, emotional and verbal abuse, a father who self harmed in front of us, and sometimes, but seldomly and it didn't really hurt, my mother hit me?

should it?

I think Sam Ovens (a great name :P ) is right to a certain extent, but he has forgotten that deep down, he isn't nothing, he is something--he is a person who wants to do well in business.

A couple years ago, I cut myself off from the pain and started getting mostly A grades at school, and now I'd say I've caught up to an extent with the overachieving kids. But something is missing. I think I need to change again because I've hit a wall. Honestly I'm starting to regress. I think I'm scared of going higher because it contrasts so much from my background, which is of nothing.

I'm not sure if Sam Oven's advice is good for me because I can't change since I'm actually no one. I don't seem to have a base (Sam's is that he wants to be a consultant).

is this the corny and saccharine part where I say I have to understand myself before I can cut myself from the past? Maybe I don't know where I came from, so I can't truly cut myself off from it?

Or maybe I just need to wake up and stop being so self absorbed? Even the act of posting here on PC is performative. I'm creating an identity, probably one that I worry too much about, and that identity is of a person who is chronically depressed.

So, (at the moment) it doesn't matter to me if I was abused or not, I just want to quickly process it and get over it as quickly as possible so I can get rid of that part of me. I'm going to try to talk to my therapist about it. I hope it won't take too long. I hope she doesn't indulge me and make sad eyes at me (because I really want to have someone feel bad for me!) I'm already halfway addicted to people giving me pity attention because of sad things, but maybe this is because I don't give myself attention to the my sad self.

So I think Sam Ovens would say that on one day to the next, you can shift yourself, and all those selves are real. So some days, I will be a person who wasn't abused at all, and that's real, and on other days, I can also recognize the problems in the past, and that's real too. There's no such thing as making it up. Does that sound weird?

Anyway, the only reason I'm writing this is that I can't get out of bed this a.m. Oh wait, I can. I'm a person who can get out of bed. I drank some Lipton, "America's favorite tea" It is not a great tea.