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I wrote a letter to your younger self. What would you wish I'd written? What would you fear I had? I'm telling you, this is some ugly philosophy

Author

Steph Saikaly
June 12, 2025

This unopened box that could deliver back in time would have changed your entire path, but I’m not your weepy mother holding this box, withholding any love found in these letters. I am your older self speaking to you, the you that is your younger self. Sharing secrets, giving tips, and unwarranted advice for how to live and accept the life you have. Like, how one day, you’ll think you’re not enough, another you’ll feel far too much. On another, you’ll tell story after story, some true and others not, but you’ll never know the difference.

This is where Ugly Philosophy comes in.

🖋️ Martyrs Make Bad Mirrors (And Worse Friends)

There’s a particular ache in the air around someone who claims to feel everything. A sort of sticky, humid empathy that clings to every interaction like a wool coat in summer. You’ve met them. Maybe you are them. The empath-martyr hybrid. The person who can’t help but take on the pain of the room, and makes sure you know it.

And here comes the ugly: martyrdom isn’t empathy. It’s emotional colonialism with better PR.

Martyrdom says: I will suffer so you don’t have to.

Empathy says: I witness your suffering, and I’m here beside you.

One centers itself. The other centers you.

🏹 Are you a hot child of god?

Martyrdom is seductive. It makes pain feel mm, warm, yummy good. In other words, noble. It offers a purpose to those of us raised to make ourselves useful or quiet or good. But it rots from the inside. Because when your value is based on suffering, you will unconsciously seek out things to suffer about. You’ll get addicted to being the most wounded person in the room. You’ll start confusing boundaries with abandonment, detachment with cruelty, self-preservation with betrayal.

And let’s be honest: the empath-martyr gets high on their own ruin. They want to be thanked for bleeding. But that’s not kindness—it’s ego in disguise.

🔥 If you, then I

If you’re truly empathic, you don’t need to nail yourself to a cross every time someone you love is struggling. You hold space, you don’t become it. You model calm, you don’t manufacture chaos (just don’t).

You love without making your love a spectacle

🥁 When the marching comes in

Let the saints have their suffering. We need fewer martyrs and more people who know how to metabolize their feelings without leaving a trail of scorched earth and guilt. We need witnesses, not saviors.

Bro, you’re not a sponge, you’re a human. Wring yourself out. You’re allowed to be soft without being sacrificial.

🍽️ -oh’s Cave

Philosophers have long warned us about the danger of building identity on suffering. Friedrich Nietzsche, patron saint of “get over yourself,” wrote: “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” The problem with martyrdom is that it only finds meaning in suffering. There’s no after, no survival, no transcendence, just an endless feedback loop of emotional combustion masquerading as nobility.

Simone Weil, a mystic and radical, believed attention was the purest form of generosity. Not sacrifice. Not despair. Attention. To truly witness someone’s pain without making it about you is an act of spiritual discipline, not just emotional labor.

So how do you crawl out of the empathy-spiral when it’s dressed up like sainthood? Cut the shit. And by shit, I mean the narrative.

Stoic thinker Epictetus suggested: “It’s not things that upset us, but our judgments about them.”

🫠 What the helly

If your brain is running the story that your pain makes you good, or that rescuing someone will finally earn you love, question it. Write it down. Talk back. Embarrass it with sunlight. Ask: “Who does this serve?”—and if the answer is me, eventually, you’re still stuck in ego.

🚪 Three Ugly Exits

Three ugly but useful exits from the spiral:

  1. Move your body before you move your mind. The nervous system is not a thought experiment. Walk, stretch, scrub a floor. Get out of your head by getting into your limbs.

  2. Say out loud what you’re not saying. Shame festers in silence. Even whispering, “I want to be seen as a good person,” robs martyrdom of its performative power.

  3. Refuse to be a hero. Heroism without consent is violence. If you’re helping someone who didn’t ask, or who you secretly resent for needing you—stop. That’s not love. That’s control in costume.

You’re not less holy for setting the burden down. You’re just less self-important. And that’s real liberation.

🔊 Question

What parts of your empathy are actually control mechanisms in drag?

When you show up for others, are you present… or performing?

Sit with that. Don’t flinch. Write it down if it stings.

 💌 P.S. Coming up…

– Why forgiveness isn’t a virtue if you’re just afraid of confrontation

– The seductive false intimacy of trauma bonding

– How spiritual bypassing became a branding strategy

– And a love letter to boundaries that feel like betrayal (because sometimes they are)

Until then—stay ugly, stay honest, and please…

put the cross down. Your hands were made for more interesting work.

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