I deserve love and happiness.

Say it about a seven-year-old and there is no argument at all. Of course they do. Nobody asks what the child produced this quarter, or reviews their conduct before approving.

The difficulty is only ever in applying the same standard to an adult who knows their own failures in detail. You hold the full file on yourself, the file is unflattering, and skipping past it feels dishonest.

But the seven-year-old grew into you without any transfer of terms. Nothing that happened in between voided it. The file got longer. That is all that changed.