"Deserving"
A few years ago, the therapy group I was in was discussing coping techniques, and the facilitator asked what might be some barriers to the crisis team's favourite suggestion of a nice bubble bath. I was in my element. You might not be sure of having enough hot water, so that any relaxation is swallowed in worry about running out. You might have small children who need your attention constantly. Your relationship with your body might make getting in the bath uncomfortable.
The facilitator heard me out and then suggested, "Sometimes we feel like we don't deserve nice things."
That puzzled me, because it didn't seem to fit. It had never occurred to me to wonder whether I deserved small pleasant things when whether I could access them was so much more relevant. If I could treat myself, I didn't need to ask whether I deserved it; if I couldn't, it didn't matter whether I deserved it or not.
I'd encountered the same odd attitude during the depths of my existential crisis, when a therapist asked why I thought I didn't deserve a relationship. Once I'd got past my instinctive response that I had never done anything evil enough to deserve the kind of relationship I could get, I interpreted it as asking why I thought I didn't deserve a happy relationship, and wondered why anyone would claim to deserve something that essentially didn't exist.
I credit football with teaching me that what you deserve and what you actually get are often a long way apart. It's a cliché that fans react to defeat by explaining why we deserved better, and while it's a simple way to save face or soothe our wounded dignity, it can't save us from the cold facts of the score or the league table. The losing side can protest that this goal should have been disallowed or that challenge should have resulted in a penalty, but the victors can simply point to the record of the result: no argument can alter that.
I'm not sure why other people keep talking about deserving things. Some of them - like the facilitator of the therapy group - seem to subscribe wholeheartedly to toxic positivity and think you can will a good outcome into being just by having a cheerful enough attitude to setbacks. But I also have friends who seem generally aware of the unpleasant facts of life and still try to convince me that I deserve things it's impossible to imagine ever having.
So why does this language of deserving persist? One place where is does feel appropriate is when you're stating a political principle, for instance. "Everyone deserves food and shelter" implies a commitment to making sure everyone can access food and shelter, even if it might be a drawn out battle. And maybe that's also what my friends are getting at: that I should believe on principle that I deserve to thrive as a preliminary step to fighting for a world in which I can.
But the gap between what I might deserve and what is achievable is just too wide. I didn't deserve the bullying I went through as a child, but it happened and the effects are still with me now. I deserve to explore volunteering options without having to ask what transphobes would make of my identity, but with the media gleefully attacking any trans person who comes to their attention, I don't have that luxury. I don't have any power to fight, so whatever I might deserve, I won't be getting it.
In some ways, it's easier to let myself think that I don't deserve anything more than what I have. At least then the world is relatively just and makes a certain sort of sense. But simpler still is to not even think about what I do or don't deserve. To concentrate on what I can realistically have and ignore any other questions. When I'm dealing with practical barriers, there's always a chance I'll find a way to surmount them if I consider all the angles. Abstractions like "deserving" just take up scarce mental energy without even the hope of achieving anything.