There is, I suspect, a particular kind of quiet evening you have known many times — the cup of tea gone cold without your noticing, the day's small obligations folded away, and somewhere on the periphery of consciousness, an old and unwelcome verdict humming faintly, like a household appliance left running in another room. The verdict says, with that infuriating economy peculiar to convictions we have never properly examined, that there is something fundamentally amiss in the way you are constituted, and you have, for as long as you can remember, simply been carrying it about with you, the way one carries a key in a pocket — weighty, unremarked, almost forgotten until the fingers chance upon it again.

It is worth pausing, before we go further, to wonder where such a verdict came from, and at whose hand it was first delivered, and — most consequentially of all — what state that person was in when they delivered it; because I have come to suspect that the deepest opinions any of us hold about ourselves are not really opinions at all but echoes, faint reverberations of someone else's tiredness, or someone else's grief, or someone else's privately unravelling Tuesday morning, mistaken many decades ago for an objective pronouncement on the kind of person we were always going to be.

We are, every one of us, raised by people who were themselves once children, carrying their own inherited verdicts, doing the difficult work of parenting on top of the unfinished business of having been parented imperfectly themselves; and so it tends to be, that what gets passed down from one generation to the next is not malice so much as preoccupation, the soft inattention of an adult lost inside their own troubles, glimpsed by a small child who is, at four or five or six, in no position to interpret what they are seeing with anything other than the most catastrophic candour. The child watches the eye that did not quite meet hers at the supper table, and instead of filing the moment under "Mother's exhausting week", she files it, with the terrible absolutism of small children, under the only heading available to her — which is, of course, the heading that says, "I am too much, or not enough, or in some essential way the wrong shape for this house".

How strange it is, when one slows down enough to consider it, that we should still be living, all these years later, by the conclusions of that small frightened witness, who drew the only conclusions a small frightened witness was capable of drawing; and how striking, too, that we have never paused to ask whether her evidence was representative, or whether the moments she observed were the rule or the exception, or whether — most likely of all — the entire question was simply unanswerable on the evidence then available, and yet she answered it anyway, because children do not have the luxury of withholding judgement, and the answer has been quietly governing your interior life ever since.

I wonder whether you might, this evening or the next, allow the verdict to be questioned — not denied, not argued with, merely questioned — and see what happens when you ask of it, very gently, "who told me this, and what was that person carrying when they did?" You may discover, as many before you have discovered, that the answer is not what you had supposed. The verdict tends, on close inspection, to dissolve into something far more poignant than a verdict: an inheritance of someone else's hard life, transmitted by accident, absorbed by a child who could not distinguish weather from climate, and remembered now as a fact about you when it was, all along, only a fact about the room you happened to grow up in.

There is a particular cruelty in being convinced, deep in the bones, that one is broken in some essential way that no amount of effort or self-improvement can ever quite address. One goes through life apologising in advance for one's presence, leaving parties slightly too early because one is sure one has outstayed one's welcome, taking rejections personally even when the rejections have nothing to do with us, because the evidence sheet was already half-filled out long before the rejection arrived — the conclusion was waiting, and the situation merely supplied the latest in a long line of confirmations. The exhaustion of living this way is enormous, and the saddest part of it is how invisible the exhaustion is, even to the person carrying it; we mistake the weight for our personality, and we mistake the weariness for a kind of mature seriousness, when in fact we are simply tired from a lifetime of arguing the case against ourselves in a private courtroom that no one else is even attending.

What might it mean, then, to entertain the possibility — only the possibility, only as a thought experiment, only for the next quarter of an hour — that nothing is essentially amiss? Not that you are without flaw; not that the troubles of your inner life are invented; merely that the particular flavour of self-condemnation you have carried since childhood is, at its root, a misreading of a small scene long ago, repeated until it acquired the feel of truth, in the way a song heard often enough begins to feel inevitable even when one has no memory of having learned it.

There is, of course, no clean cure for such a long inheritance, no single insight that will undo what was absorbed over a thousand small mealtimes. But there is, I think, the slow work of suspecting oneself a little less — of asking, each time the verdict surfaces, "too much for whom, exactly, and by what measure, and on whose authority?" — and of being patient with how reluctantly the verdict surrenders its grip; for it has been your companion for so long that its departure, when it finally begins to depart, can feel oddly like loneliness, even though loneliness in this case is closer to freedom than to loss.

You may begin to suspect, in time, that you were never amiss after all; that you were once a small person watching weather you had no equipment to interpret; that you made of that weather the only sense it was possible to make; and that you are now, at last, permitted to make a different sense of yourself, with the older and gentler mind you have spent so many years earning, in spite of everything.