Most of my negative self talk is self-injurious in nature so I won’t trouble you further with the exact content, but I’ve had difficulty finding a good substitute because I have a pretty strong aversion to the more flowery language a lot of positive self-affirmations use, but I still wanted something that rolled off the tongue as well as poetry so it sticks in my head better.

I really liked the meter of “because I could not stop for death,” and it turns out you can easily get the same meter out of chat gpt by asking for 14-syllable couplets in iambic pentameter, then splitting the lines at the 8-syllable mark and mixing and matching as-needed. I asked for a few different versions and after some mixing and matching I got to:

"You make mistakes but take a breath
and let your torment go.
Forgive yourself for stuff you did,
and things you didn't know."

…so I’m gonna give myself a good ol’ cognitive-behavioral thought restructuring and try to at least repeat it after each self-abusive thought, then hopefully be able to replace them entirely. I’ll let you all know how it goes, but I wanted to share in case any of you wanted to try it with me!