Finally understood why I love angst

I must have wasted like a fifth of my entire lifetime reading angsty stories full of sad pity-invoking characters, stories in which someone in need of help receives such help, not to mention they get the love they wish they had.

And now, after so many years I understand why I love them so much, why I seek comfort in them.

These characters, to put it simply, are miserable. They receive love only ever through other people's pity, because they can't love theirselves enough to create relationships and receive it in the "hard" way. It is a dynamic that clearly stems from great insecurity and self-hate, one so profound that a person can only blindly beg the world to be somehow seen and "saved".

But I can't be that person. I can't be that character. Because at the end, when it all gets worse once you decided that you "liked" getting worse, nobody is actually there to help, because you kicked everyone away.

No, the right way to receive love is the hard way, and that means loving yourself. Working on yourself, and therefore putting effort in the way you treat others, feeling empathy for youself and others, putti g effort in the things you do, not merely letting yourself go to your own sadness and guilt.

You should love yourself as an act of love towards others, in other words. And angsty characters have no care for others, not really. They like to wallow in their angst, feeling secure in it, never having to take a step forward.

And I simply cannot be that anymore.