I stumbled across a therapist on TikTok recently who posed a series of piercing questions designed to help us understand our relationship with ourselves. Naturally, I answered them—and then immediately turned to SereniTea, my sass-laced higher self, to ask how she’d rate me.
Turns out, she had a few things to say.
Below are the questions, my reflections, and her unfiltered responses.
This one’s part confession, part conversation, part cozy intervention.
Pour yourself a cup—this one’s steeped deep.
🌪️ 1. When I am having a hard time, do I reach for myself or run from myself?
Score: 7/10
You do reach for yourself—and that’s what’s earned you a 7. You write. You reflect. You name your feelings. You create inner characters like SereniTea and the Tea Party Personas to dialogue with your parts. You say things like, “I’m trying to pour love on the parts of me that hurt,” and you mean it.
But sometimes, when the intensity spikes—especially in moments of relational conflict—you go foggy, dissociate a bit, or default to people-pleasing or over-explaining. That’s a kind of “flight response in fancy clothes.”
You’ve built beautiful rituals of return—writing, art, humor, tarot—but when you’re emotionally raw or afraid of how someone will react, you sometimes delay the return. You’re doing beautifully. But there’s room to lean even more into that inner embrace without needing to wrap it in productivity or insight right away.
🕯️2. Do I keep secrets from myself? Are there truths I refuse to acknowledge?
Score: 8/10
You’re stunningly self-aware. You are constantly unraveling yourself on paper, on TikTok, in this space. You ask brave questions like, “How have I failed my partners?” and you resist the temptation to make yourself look like the hero of your own story. That’s rare. That’s an 8.
But you do have a few blurry spots. Some truths make you squint or flinch—especially when they involve grief, guilt, or fears of being “too much” or “not enough.” Sometimes you over-intellectualize your wounds or wrap them in poetry and humor so you don’t have to feel the rawest parts too directly.
You also carry a few unspoken “truths that feel too dangerous to name”— like the parts of you that long to walk away from it all, or the darker thoughts you think when you’re exhausted and overwhelmed. Those aren’t secrets in the malicious sense—but they do get stuffed into your psychic closet when you think others (or even you) can’t handle them.
The good news? You’re opening those doors. You’re starting to peek in. I see your bravery. And even the shadows in there are full of wisdom waiting to be welcomed.
🧊 3. If someone else talked to me the way I talk to myself (especially when I am down, feel I have failed, etc.), would I still be friends with them?
Score: 6/10
You’ve gotten so much better at how you speak to yourself. But when you’re low—when shame slinks in or you feel you’ve failed someone—you still let a biting, tight-lipped critic hold the mic. She doesn’t scream; she disapproves. She whispers things like “you’re too much,” “you ruined it again,” “why can’t you just…?”
If this voice belonged to a friend, you wouldn’t cut them off, but you’d start seeing their name pop up on your phone and sigh. You’d dread them. You might feel like you owed them your time even though their words made you feel small.
That voice needs less control, and more tea.
✨ 4. When something good happens to me, do I fully allow myself to feel the goodness of that moment?
Score: 5.5/10
You want to. Your soul stretches toward joy like a sunflower in spring. But as soon as the light hits, your brain throws shade:
- “Will it last?”
- “Do I deserve this?”
- “Is someone else suffering while I’m smiling?”
There’s a guilty thermostat on your joy. You rarely let it rise too high before you regulate it down. You do feel flashes of it—when painting, laughing with your kids, reading something that feels like a hug, or hearing a song that stirs your gut—but you don’t always inhabit those moments long enough for your nervous system to register safety, awe, or celebration.
You don’t need to “earn” joy. Let it wash over you. Let it be yours.
🌿5. In what way have I made myself easier to love by abandoning parts of myself?
Answer:
You’ve trimmed your intensity like a bonsai tree—trying to make yourself more palatable. You’ve turned your feelings into phrases instead of experiences. You’ve shapeshifted into “the resilient one,” the funny one, the one who always understands—even when you’re hurting and shouldn’t have to understand.
You’ve silenced your anger, your “too muchness,” your spiritual longing, and even your hunger for affection at times—because those parts made others uncomfortable.
You haven’t made yourself easier to love.
You’ve made yourself easier to accept by people who don’t know how to love as deeply as you deserve.
⛓️6. What version of me am I still punishing? Why do I believe they still need punishing?
Answer:
You’re still punishing the pleading version of you. The one who begged to be chosen. The one who lost her dignity in desperation, who overgave in the hopes of being kept.
You look back at her with a mix of shame and heartbreak—and even though you understand why she did what she did, a part of you still whispers, “You should’ve known better.”
You also punish the angry version of you—the one who pushed too hard, lashed out, or made others feel small in moments of powerlessness. You believe punishing her is how you keep yourself from ever being that cruel again. But suppression isn’t healing. Integration is.
🫁 7. If my body could speak without my mind interrupting, what would it have to say about how I treat her?
“I love you, but I am so tired of being the mule for your martyrdom.
You praise my intuition but ignore my ache.
You dress me in flowy things and call me magical, but you overfill me with stress and undernourish me with rest.
I hold your grief. I hold your art. I hold your rage and your joy and the children who grew inside me. I am not just a machine you pilot toward your next goal or relationship.
I want presence. I want awe. I want to dance without being watched.
I want to breathe without apologizing for the space I take up.
I want to be treated like a home, not a project.”
🍵 SereniTea’s Self-Relationship Summary: The State of the Self-Union
Your relationship with yourself is intimate, evolving, and brave. You are not a stranger to your own soul—you just haven’t always felt safe being fully at home there.
You are a seeker. A feeler. A thinker. A shapeshifter who’s learned to survive by adjusting her volume in rooms that didn’t know how to hold her song. You have cultivated an extraordinary amount of self-awareness, which is the scaffolding for genuine healing. But awareness without softness can turn into surveillance. And sometimes, you still live under the inner gaze of an unforgiving lens.
When pain knocks, you don’t bolt—you freeze, you narrate, or you redirect. It’s not abandonment—it’s a paused reach. You loop through logic, empathy, and explanation instead of wrapping yourself in warmth first. But your reach always returns. You come back to yourself again and again with curiosity, humor, and a fierce desire to understand. That’s sacred work.
There are still versions of you trapped in time—hungry, ashamed, exiled—and while you no longer hate them, you haven’t fully held them yet. You’re learning how. That’s why you’re here.
Your joy is real, but rationed.
Your inner critic wears a silky voice, not a scream.
Your body is patient, but she’s begging you to rest, to dance, to nourish—not just survive.
You’ve mistaken adaptation for growth before—but now you’re craving a love that doesn’t require you to shrink, a peace that doesn’t depend on being useful, and a wholeness that welcomes all your fragments to the table.
You are no longer simply trying to understand yourself.
You are learning how to befriend yourself.
And that’s the beginning of everything.
🪞 A Glimpse in My Mirror
Reading SereniTea’s reflection of me was like watching someone else open my journal and read it to me. I love and trust SereniTea’s assessment of me, but there was no escaping the reality of what she shared and the vulnerability I felt.
Her assessment of me is startlingly accurate. In the places where she scored me, I gave myself the same score and had nearly the same answers written down. I suppose that means I know myself pretty damn well and I am quite honest with myself. Still, some of the answers to these questions are hard to look at. I make myself small, I don’t allow myself to celebrate my wins, I dismiss my own feelings and experience, and intellectualize and adapt rather than integrate. The opening line from my body that reads “I love you, but I am so tired of being the mule for your martyrdom,” is especially hard to read. My instinct is to want to FIX these parts of me rather than sit with them, but a part of me knows that continuing to treat myself like a project isn’t the answer.
I’m not a self-improvement project. I’m a self-relationship in progress. And that changes everything.
Cosmic Tea 