I was genuinely a horrible person

You are no longer that person. You were a teenager still figuring yourself out . forgive and be kinder to yourself. Who you choose to be here on out is what matters

Younger you doesn’t know everything older you does now. I tell myself: Be the person you needed when you were younger.

First off, I’m really sorry that you are struggling with this. Real event holds a lot of shame and guilt. Secondly, I know exactly how you feel. I spent about 3 years being consumed every day by bad things I did as a teenager to about 20. I punished myself by pretty much restricting any form of enjoyment in life from myself. I didn’t know how to move forward with my life. I know it’s very difficult… we can accept we did wrong and feel awful for it. But we can also accept that unfortunately, as bad as we feel, there’s nothing that we can do to go back and fix things. I know how crushing that feels. But instead of letting it absolutely consume us, we can learn to take each day as a new opportunity to better ourselves. That’s the only power we have. And we can’t do that if we stay stuck in these same cycles. I know it stinks, and some days are better than others, but you can do it. It does get better. Sometimes it comes back up again, but you can learn to sit with the feelings and move forward. And no matter how old we are or where we’re at in life, we will always make mistakes. We’ll do wrong things sometimes no matter how hard we try. But it’s okay. It doesn’t have to be a bag of rocks that we carry around. I really hope that things get better and you can learn to forgive yourself. ❤️‍🩹

It took me quite a while to get to this place: I don't need others permission in order to forgive myself. And I'm allowed to be happy even when others "wouldn't want me to be happy". Your suffering and guilt, if anything at all, is serving other's egos, while it's eating at you on the inside. You're allowed to give yourself radical permission to drop the ball: "I'm done ruminating on this, I'm done worrying about this, and I'll take any positive or negative consequences that may follow". You don't need to hold on to guilt for the rest of your life in order to prove that you want to do things differently than in 8th grade. Eventually, if you keep practicing, you will get better at not being manipulated by guilt. It's a life skill I'm still working on too :)