I've been lurking around for seddit for a long time, and have trying to make progress on my inner game, but it has been going very slowly. I've read and re-read the sidebar and have tried to internalize it, but something always seemed off, until today I realized what the problem was. Many times it is mentioned that for a nice guy to recover, he must start putting his needs before others. I always struggled with this concept, and now I know why. Before, my only need was making sure that other people were happy. That was it. Every action I took was based on the premise of making someone else happy. And so now that I'm supposed to start putting my needs first, I feel extremely lost. The one need I have been able to identify has been to feel happy, but before, all my happiness came from putting others before myself. I have no idea what to do in order to progress.

The second thing I realized is that I was using the fact that I was seen as smart to let it control aspects of my life. I think that the only way people would ever be friends with me was because of my intellect. So I would not do any homework at all. This may seem counter-productive, but in reality it provided plausible deniability. If I did poorly on a test, I could chalk it up to the fact that I never did homework and was still actually smart. This year in Calc 1 I've been doing pretty bad, so I decided I would actually study for this next quiz. Even after studying 15 hours over the past week for the quiz today, I completely bombed it and feel horrible, as I'll probably get a C or high D in the class. I have no idea how to accept that I might not be as smart as I chalk myself up to be, since that is the "mask" I use to get through the day.