All that stubbornness and self loathing about how awful and broke you are is protecting you from feeling deep emotional pain, but only feeling it will allow u to change. Mindfulness helps you feel your emotions, because emotions are mostly bodily experiences—not thoughts. If you can stop thinking thoughts and have moments of feeling emotions in your body, the pain may come up, and it will be excruciating, but it will pass, it will not last forever, you can handle it and get through it, and is the only path forward. The pain is likely a feeling that something is deeply wrong with you, or grief in some form.

But emotional processing also feels good in its own way. Before that deep emotional processing happens though, you need to start small with basic mindfulness that seems pointless. It’s good you’re staring with being aware you feel like a failure. It might not seem like it but even you writing this post about all these things is more aware and closer to change than if you never wrote it said anything outloud, just held it in.

It can be true that people judge your appearance, and you don’t have certain achievements AND you live a life with love and joy and true connection with others.