Self Maid

You know that sharp, stinging, ringing in your ears type of irritation that comes from someone trying to explain you to yourself. You know the type to do it: the friend who tells you you look tired (as if it’s news to you that you barely slept last night), the family members who loves to define you based on the few traits you show during the rare times you see each other, or the wannabe psychologist acquaintance who decides they’ve diagnosed you over lunch. It’s not just annoying… it’s kind of dehumanizing.

The Arrogance of Assumed Knowledge

When someone presumes to know you better than you do, what they’re really saying is they don’t think your self-understanding is up to par with their own. It’s an invalidation of personal agency dressed up as helpfulness. The tone might be breezy, the intentions might be good (though usually they’re just taking out of their ass), but the message lands the same: “I prefer giving out opinions over finding out how little I really know”. What’s frustrating is how normal this behaviour is for some others. The problem isn’t the act of giving advice itself, it’s the assumption behind it: that you need to be corrected, enlightened, or explained to because they know more.

Unsolicited Advice and the Discomfort of Being “Managed”

There’s something particularly invasive about unsolicited advice. It doesn’t matter if it’s about fitness or fashion, unsolicited advice is annoying and discredits your autonomy. You never asked for a life coach, nor do you need one, yet for some reason there’s always someone around who tries to project-manage everything from your feelings, to your appearance, to your itinerary.

For women especially, this kind of social micromanagement is constant. We’re told how to look, how to feel, how to behave, and how to “work on ourselves.” The performance of care is really just a cover for control.

The Pop-Psychology Problem

Then there’s the modern epidemic of people diagnosing others as if they’ve actually studied the DSM-5. If you mention being distracted, someone will say, “That’s your ADHD.” If you’re introverted, “You must be on the spectrum.” Tired? Oops, you must be depressed. Somewhere between TikTok therapy and the rise of mental health awareness, empathy has been replaced by pseudo-expertise.

To be clear, understanding mental health is good. But applying diagnostic labels to people without context, consent, or proper education, only creates confusion and distrust. It turns lived experience into content fodder. And, again, it assumes the speaker’s insight outranks the subject’s own understanding of their emotions.

Why People Do This (and What It Says About Them)

It’s tempting to think these people are simply arrogant (and sometimes they are). But more often, their behavior reveals something else: a deep discomfort with uncertainty. Many people feel safer when they can categorize others neatly, when they can translate your complexity into something legible and manageable, even if they’re way off due to their crude analytical ability.

Psychologists sometimes frame this as a form of ego defense: the mind’s attempt to maintain control over the social world. If I can explain you, I don’t have to face the ambiguity of who you really are. The unsolicited advice-giver often sees themselves as the hero of their own narrative: the one who helps, enlightens, rescues. Beneath that self-appointed authority is usually a need to feel competent or needed.

In some cases, it’s projection: people seeing in you what they’re unwilling to acknowledge in themselves. A person hyper-focused on “fixing” others might be avoiding their own unresolved chaos. What looks like confidence can actually be anxiety in disguise: a fear of irrelevance or of losing social footing.

Understanding that doesn’t make it less irritating, but it reframes the dynamic. When someone insists they know you better than you do, it often has less to do with you and everything to do with their own need for certainty, control, or self-worth.

Why It Hurts

It’s easy to shrug this off as a minor social annoyance, but it cuts deeper than that. When people treat you like a puzzle to be solved, they flatten you. They turn your complexity into a caricature. It’s not just that they’re wrong, it’s that they refuse to let you be right about you. And honestly… what the fuck is up with that…

Self-knowledge is hard-won. It’s shaped by years of observation, mistakes, and quiet self-reflection. When someone swoops in and overwrites that with a single comment or casual label, they’re not just misjudging you; they’re interrupting your narrative.

The Case for Curiosity Over Certainty

Maybe the antidote is humility, not just in others but in ourselves as well. The best conversations come from curiosity, not certainty. Instead of assuming we know what’s best for someone, we can ask what they’ve already learned. Instead of diagnosing, we can listen and support.

Because, at the end of the day, the only person who truly knows your story—every chapter, footnote, and omitted phrase—is you.