There is a sentence that climbs up your throat on the bad days. What did I do to deserve this. Some people finish it out loud — to deserve these parents, to deserve this life with this person, to deserve waking up in this exact room again. You can carry that question a long time. It rarely hands anything back.
If this were punishment, it would have a size
Think about how punishment actually works. A fine prints an amount and a date. A sentence comes with a length — this many months, and then the door opens and you walk out. Someone set the price. You pay the price. The account closes.
Even the worst of them has an edge on it. You can stand at the front of it and point at the place where it stops.
That closing is the whole point. Without it, the word means nothing. A penalty nobody can total up, with no last payment on it, is not a penalty at all.
You have paid it more than once, and it is still open
Now hold your own life next to that. Nobody named a figure. Nobody set a release date. There is no office you can walk into and ask how much is left to pay.
You have taken more than you ever thought you could take. You have said to yourself, more than once, that you have served whatever this is. You kept a private count. You decided that after this much, surely, the thing would be settled.
Then a season goes by, and there you are in the same kitchen, in the same argument, saying what you already said the last time.
Nothing closed. Nothing got crossed off. Whatever you keep paying and never finish paying is not a punishment — that shape does not exist inside punishment. And once the punishment goes, the crime behind it goes with it. There is no ledger. Nobody wrote your name at the top of a page and started adding.
A hard life is heavy, and it is still not payment for anything. None of it is here because of something you did wrong. It looks like somebody’s fault. It is nobody’s fault.
Nobody asks what a rich man did to deserve it
You never hear the other version. Nobody looks at a man with money and asks what he did to deserve that. You only reach for crime and payment when something hurts. Which means those words are not describing your life. They are describing how much your life stings right now.
The word hiding inside why me
That question is not asking about the pain. It is hunting for a name — who did this, who let it happen, who has to answer for it.
So you go looking for a place to set the blame down. Outside first — your parents, the person you live with. You build a case against one of them, and it does not hold. So you turn it inward. What did I do wrong. What is wrong with me.
Pick a name and watch what happens next
Once you settle on an answer, there is no next step.
Land on your parents and you are left holding resentment. Land on yourself and you are left holding self-blame. One burns and one freezes, and both of them are heavy, and neither one moves you a single inch. Tomorrow morning arrives exactly the same either way. The name changed. Nothing else did.
That is the clue that Who is to blame? is not producing the answer you need. Blaming your parents may explain where the pain began, and blaming yourself may create the illusion of control, but neither tells you what you need now or what you can do next. The question keeps you searching for a guilty person when your life requires a response.
Living beside someone impossible, or coming into money
We learn who we are by living through very different things. Some people learn it beside someone impossible. Some learn it by getting rich. Nobody would call the second one a punishment.
So here is how I read it. Joy, pain, and a problem that refuses to resolve each reveal different parts of you. Pressure shows what makes you go silent, what makes you attack, what you can endure, and where you abandon yourself to keep a relationship. The circumstances differ, but each one brings your habitual way of meeting life into view.
Your particular life is therefore where you encounter yourself. Not because the suffering was assigned as punishment, but because your responses become visible only in the situations you actually have to live through.
Knowing yourself probably means nothing to you right now
If I told you to go find out who you are, you would have no idea what to do with Monday. I know. But you are already in the middle of finding out. That is what these years are.
So watch yourself in the middle of them. What makes you go silent. What makes you say the thing you will regret before midnight. Whose one sentence still takes your legs out years later. What you can carry far longer than you expected to. Where you fold on the first push.
You are not a fact filed away somewhere, waiting to be looked up. You are what shows up in how you meet what is in front of you. It comes out in pieces, mostly under pressure.
When it climbs up your throat again
I am not asking you to stop saying it. Say it. Say the whole thing, out loud if you are alone in the car. What did I do to deserve these parents. What did I do to deserve this life with this person. Do not cut it short and do not be polite with it.
Then, when the question has run all the way out, add another one: What does this situation show me about what I fear, what I keep repeating, and what I need to do differently now?
The circumstances may not change immediately. But the second question gives you somewhere to move. The first searches for someone to charge; the second helps you recognise your pattern and choose your next response.
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Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board