A person can hate being judged while secretly depending on judgment to know who they are.

Resenting judgment and relying on it can coexist easily. If your sense of who you are is assembled mostly from other people’s reactions, then their assessments are both intolerable and necessary, and you will find yourself seeking out the very evaluations you claim to reject. The discomfort is real; so is the dependence.

Try describing yourself without reference to how anyone has responded to you. What you value, what you actually do, what you are working on. It is harder than expected. Building even a small part of your self-description from the inside reduces how much power the outside verdicts have.