"Useless Girl"

I think of myself as a pretty neat person.

Occasionally, the clean laundry sits stacked in my closet — near the hangers and shelves, but still in the same pile I brought up from the dryer. Every week, Barry and I clean the house top to bottom — him with the vacuum, me with the bathrooms, dusting, floors, furniture. The kitchen we split down the middle.

But every spring, when it’s finally warm enough to open the windows, we go deeper.

That’s when the cushions come off, curtains come down, windows and sills get scrubbed — every nook and cranny. And I’m always surprised by how grimy and gritty the in-between, forgotten spaces of the sofa cushions can get. Even in a clean house. Even when you think you’ve been keeping up.

Lately, I’ve been realizing I’ve been doing the same thing with my thinking.

The cartoon bubble

I used to joke that it’s a good thing I don’t have a cartoon bubble over my head showing people what I’m really thinking.

I thought it was harmless. I’d look at someone and think something unkind, feel a flash of judgment or self-righteous anger — and then smile, say nothing, move on. I’m being nice, I told myself. The inside stuff doesn’t count if the outside looks fine.

That’s the lie I’ve been living with. And last week — Easter week of all weeks — it blew up in my face.

“Useless girl”

It was 8 pm. I’d been working since 5:30 that morning. Bleary-eyed, bone-weary — the kind of tired where it feels like someone beat your body while you were sleeping. I was finally about to sit down with my husband when a text came in. Someone who was supposed to help me post something for social media — something I’d needed hours earlier — was telling me she couldn’t access what she needed.

I felt it rise up. That quick, ugly thought: this person is useless.

I grabbed my phone and pulled up a chat window — I wanted help wording a firm but polite response, something that would get what I needed without torching the relationship. I typed out everything — my frustration, my exhaustion, what I needed, even the dark thought I was trying to get past.

I hit send.

It wasn’t the chat window.

Her name at the top. My words underneath:

“Useless girl.”

I sat there. The phone in my hand. The silence in the room.

There’s a moment — most of us have had some version of it — where the inside gets out. Where the cartoon bubble becomes real.

I reached out to her immediately and apologized. She was gracious — more gracious than I deserved. But I knew, even as I received her kindness, that the damage was done. You can’t unsend a text. And something in me recognized that this wasn’t just about her. It was about me. About the damage I do constantly to myself when I live out of alignment — body, mind, and spirit — with the person I am trying to become.

What Easter showed me

It was Easter week, and I kept thinking about Christ — really thinking about Him. Standing before the sick, the poor, the desperate. Can you imagine a cartoon bubble over His head reading: these people are so needy and annoying?

The image is almost absurd.

And yet that's exactly what I had been doing. Telling myself that what I thought privately didn't count, as long as my actions looked right on the outside. What I did was cruel — not because I hit send by mistake, but because the thought was already there. And I had been pretending otherwise for a long time. When we perform niceness on the outside while harboring judgment on the inside, we can only keep them separate for so long.

The text didn't create the cruelty. It just finally let it out.

What happened in the meeting

The next morning, I told on myself in my 12-step meeting. All of it — the exhaustion, the thought, the text, the apology, her graciousness, and the hollow feeling that stayed with me anyway.

My share became the unofficial topic of the meeting. I can’t say what anyone else shared — that belongs to that room. What I can tell you is what happened inside me as I sat there. I started to see something I hadn’t wanted to name: I wasn’t just having random unkind thoughts. I was acting as a judge in my own head — looking down on people from some private, elevated place, even while I was being perfectly nice on the outside.

In recovery, we are told over and over that we are not responsible for the first thought — only the ones that follow. That has always been a comfort to me.

But sitting there, something new clicked.

What if I’ve been using that as permission? Permission to let those first thoughts just sit. To let them build up and harden into a way of seeing the world. To let them live in the hidden corners of my mind — like the grime behind the stove that nobody gets to because it’s hard to reach and easy to ignore. It’s there. You know it’s there. You just decide not to look.

The shift

Here’s what I’m starting to understand.

If I actually begin working on those thoughts — not suppressing them, not pretending they don’t exist, but sweeping them out when they arrive, not letting them settle in and take up residence — then something changes. Gradually. The way a house that gets deep-cleaned regularly starts to stay cleaner between cleanings. If I stop giving those thoughts a home, then eventually even the first thoughts may have nowhere to land. Nowhere to stick. No home in my mind.

That’s the work. That’s the long game.

And it starts in that small space between the first thought and the next one.

Instead of thinking this person is useless — I can land on something true and clean: this person can’t help me right now in the way I need. That’s it. No cruelty. No verdict. No story about someone’s worth. And I still get to honor that I needed something and didn’t get it. I can honor myself without tearing someone else down.

Under the cushions

That’s what I’m learning about lasting change. It doesn’t happen by looking good on the outside. It happens when we’re willing to pull up the cushions, move the stove, and look honestly at what’s been quietly building in the places we’ve been avoiding.

There’s a line Jesse Jackson made famous that I love: “The only time you should ever look down at someone is when you are helping them up.”

I want to be someone who looks at people that way — the way I believe we are all called to look at each other. I’m not there yet. But I’m willing to do the spring cleaning it takes to get closer.

And that’s where it starts. In the forgotten spaces. The ones we finally decide to look at.

💙

Buy the book: amazon.com/author/karenrubinstein