How to handle criticism that you feel is true

There is this certain group of people who tells me that I have a bad attention span. I feel like that criticism is true for I always forget school-related work.

It's very hard, but if these people know you really well and you genuinely feel that they care for you, maybe it's time to accept it and seek help or seek helpful advice. That's what I expect friends and family to tell me, rather than tell me that everything's fine. My friend was the first person to tell me I'm acting really weird, I really appreciated that.

Hi vafhj, welcome to PC
Well you could throw it right back at them (if you felt comfortable) with "Yes, I do forget school work at times, what do you suggest, how do/would you keep up?"
But............forgetting school related work (and anything else??) doesn't have to mean you've got a bad attention span..........maybe it's more that it doesn't interest you as much......so you're not as likely to absorb it as well.
So........can you do anything to make it more interesting e.g. a little imagination. For example put yourself in the place of........."in your head" substitute elements of fractions for something more interesting, that kind of thing.
And hey, you might want to think about some things that may not be helping too?? e.g. are you sitting somewhere which stops you concentrating so much, even right down to routines beforehand or if you're getting enough sleep. Even small changes can help sometimes.
And maybe try to get a "systems" together for remembering things e.g. make (more?) notes and check back on them, even read them aloud which can help; stick post-it notes around to help you remember specific things; even do some study with friends which could help............??
But if you find school work difficult, maybe talk to a teacher/tutor, who may be able to help a little with some things to make it easier??
But I hope this group of people aren't only throwing you criticisms??!! While this one might be helpful in leading you somewhere........make sure you're not only accepting/getting criticism, hey??
Alison

I must add: the people who said that have a tendency of gaslighting me. However, it is true that I have a bad attention span and my grades aren't as good as they could be.

Hi vafhj, it sounds like maybe you'd recognised yourself that you weren't doing as well as you could with your grades??? At least a little???
So while what they said was true, I'm thinking that maybe with a little more confidence (without the gaslighting??) you could be coming to address that without them?
So do you think you could maybe distance yourself from them? And if you can't do that physically (depending on the situation) then at least mentally, and focus more on you.
And on doing the best you can do for you??
Might be a lot easier without this group of people and the obvious effects they're going to be having on you so "prominent".
And then if you feel you're struggling or not sure where to go/what to do, then turn to someone who does have your best interests in the forefront of what they're thinking/suggesting/advising/telling you.
And you know we're here to help where we can
Alison

Also, how do you ignore people who you cannot physically avoid?

I don't look at them or make any eye contact or I look RIGHT THROUGH them as if they don't even exist.
jim

It's not easy. Try looking above them. What I mean is take a look at them, surely they have faults because there is no one perfect. Look at the bigger picture for a minute. They are just a few people around you, there are many, many more people around them and in the world. This planet is just one of billions of planets in space. You might see just how insignificant those people are around you when you look at the bigger picture. When ever I feel some one is looking down at me, I remind myself how truly insignificant their opinion is in the vast realm of life.

BTW, the thing about my classmates is that they constantly remind me of my bad traits and that they believe in truth tea so much that they do not care when their comments hurt.

Accept the fact that nobody is perfect, including you and your friends. OK, so it may hurt a little. Sometimes truth DOES hurt. So what? It's better to deal with hurtful truths than hurtful lies.

Deep down inside yourself you already know what you must do to improve yourself. Good luck to you !

Criticism is so annoying, especially the kind of criticism that doesnt even help us improve ourselves. Sometimes you just wish it never came around. But the problem is, if you never get criticized you can never develop and improve yourself. You will be forever stuck in a rut. As for avoiding people in public you cant physically avoid, just do what was already stated and try your best to not associate with them.

I show people I don't care for respect but I refuse to get involved with them beyond that.

Even if the comments have truth doesn't mean they have to always point it out. If you feel it's getting to a point where it's disresepctful, kindly remind them that you've noted that and would like for them to stop bringing it up. You don't treat them that way (hopefully lol) so you don't want to hear it from them. Hopefully they'll feel too awkward to pick on you after that. If it continues, stop hanging out with them and limit your conversations as much as possible. They don't deserve your company if they treat you poorly.

It is hard when people we don't particularly like or who we wish were friends say things that we find humiliating because of their truth. However, it is our feeling of humiliation that is the problem, not the other people saying whatever? Are you working to increase your attention span? 5 ways to increase your attention span - The Week Have you asked for help with your grades?

There's a lot of pride involved in learning new things and the rate we learn them versus how soon other people learn them, etc. but we all have things we are better or worse at, and different things we learn easier than others do. Don't value what other people value, decide on your own values and work for them. If you want better grades, ask for help and work at getting better grades instead of hanging back and letting your self esteem take a hit from others. Self esteem is not meant to be armor but to help you continue to learn and grow for yourself. Wanting something and going after it is the best self esteem has to offer, you have no time for other people's jealous, negative comments if you are working on yourself. That's what they wish they'd do for themselves but don't know how.

Admittedly, these people still make me want to recite the spoken intro to Never Ever by All Saints. Even though they went about all their criticisms in a really mean manner, they were willing to criticize me for some flaws which some people would just ignore. To be fair, said flaws have mostly been fixed, but I guess all the traumas they gave me are feeding into my victim mentality.

Another thread that's years old.

Yeah, I bumped this to update y'all on how I feel about all this four years after.

[Generation Z] The "good" teenagers - Page 8

Hey, didn't notice all the hugs on my post until now. :P

Like, at the time, I was in a place where I was so annoying and neurotic that it was not hard for people with low thresholds for BS not to snap at me. Because when I first met these people, I was really fake. I mean, being fake is understandable, but what was more mind-boggling was how much I was also being fake to myself. I guess I just had a higher tolerance for fakeness back in the day, because today, every time I try to be fake, I wind up feeling like crap. Then again, I know a way to make myself feel better about this all: that because I was so fake, the people criticizing me weren't even criticizing the real me, so they were really criticizing somebody else. (I made a Vaguebook post saying just that, and it was one of the few moments that I was capable of making sick burns involving them.)

Admittedly, this is true reason I am still pissed off at these people. Yes, I am of course, to an extent, angry that I was wronged, but you know what? When this all began in 2012, my rocky early teens had just ended, but I did not ruminate about the people who wronged me in my early adolescence, because I developed this narrative in my mind about how I could do no wrong and that anybody who said otherwise was just a two-dimensional monster slash jealous hater unable to deal with their own issues and that someday, I was gonna find a bunch of friends, I mean enablers, who would never question my narrative evuhrrrr. But as for the people in my late teens, they not only wronged me, but the way they wronged me went against my narrative. 'Cause yes, they were excessively harsh in the way they treated me, but at heart, they were just annoyed by my attention-seeking ways and fakeness.

I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing that.

Are you more bothered by the way they present the criticism or by your belief that it the criticism is true?

If it's the former, the problem is strictly theirs. Whether or not you forget school-related work, that is no reflection on you as a person. I know it's easier for me to say that than for you to internalize it, but you will eventually develop the ability to do so.

If it's the latter, remember that you do have the power to change -- and that, since you've already acknowledged your issues here, you're that much closer to improving yourself in this regard.

Best wishes,
Veronica

But this was a long time ago and I'm only talking about how I feel about all this now.

TL;DR: while I am, of course, angry that I was wronged, if anything, it's actually even more anger-inducing to me that I can't bend reality to my will, and I'm still bitter that other people dared remind me of that.

It's true that I'm more angry at people revealing many ugly truths to me than the fact I was wronged by them. If I was mostly angry at the fact I was being wronged, I wouldn't be acting like this. If that were the case, I'd be scarred but I wouldn't be constantly philosophizing about all the dark truths I've learned and screaming at the sky about how I wish the world were more to my liking and how I wish everything went my way. Isn't this the behavior of someone who can't admit defeat? I'm a fairly self-aware person, I know what I'm saying. Why would I be angry at their insults if there were no grains of truth in what they were saying? When this all happened, this happened at a time when I was at my most annoying. Other people who came before them traumatized me. To deal with the trauma, I taught myself how to not only turn myself into a totally different person, but also how to be in denial and how to convince myself that I was that totally different person. The way I see it, it's one thing to pretend to be someone else to others, and that happens all the time. What is totally different is pretending to be someone else to yourself. I mean, aren't people in denial annoying? Let me think of some archetypes of people totally in denial: the closet gay who constantly makes references about how much he likes guys, but thinks it's OK as long as he adds "no homo," or the ugly and old woman who thinks she's still hot and squeezes herself into clothes that either don't fit her size-wise or just aesthetic-wise. Wouldn't both of them make you want to shout at them about how annoying they are? The point here is, yes, people shouldn't have put me in a situation where I was not only said bad things to (that would actually have been deserved in moderation), but they were also putting me in a loop and acting as if I couldn't change, because that would indeed mean I couldn't change, especially not with them shouting at me, but it wouldn't have been good to enable me either, and maybe, just maybe, enabling someone so deeply in denial would not have been such a good idea, and it honestly shouldn't have been a surprise that people were being annoyed by me.