On Self-Loathing

CW: frank & extended discussion of mental illness, trauma, self-loathing & self-harm; bullying & social exclusion; SA; dissociation; recovery & therapy; mentions of addiction, EDs, & medication

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DISCLAIMER:

In addition to the content warnings, I think it is important to make several explicit exhortations.

First is that, despite the many different ways I talk about it, I want to make clear that in my right mind, I know that self-loathing and self-harm are not a healthy way to live life. Self-loathing is, of course complicated, but my goal in writing this is, in part, to describe why I need to recover from it and, in writing about it, help my own recovery. Self-harm is, of course, an extremely dangerous coping mechanism, and if you can stop, or not start in the first place, you should.

Second: this might be difficult to read for people who care about me. It describes some concerning and distressing behavior I've displayed through the years, the kind of stuff I don't often talk about openly. I try not to be too graphic, but there are points where it's upsetting anyways, and points where it's necessary (and, apparently, there may be points where I'm not aware of how intense some of the content is because I'm so desensitized). This warning may apply if you know someone going through something similar as well, so tread with caution.

Last, but perhaps most importantly, if you deal with self-loathing and self-harm this might not be an advisable read if you're not in a good place with that stuff. I don't want to trigger anyone, so I've done my best to avoid specifics, but I know that the subjects themselves can be triggering if you're in a certain state of mind. So, please, be careful, and only read this if you're doing okay, have support, and/or if you truly think it will help. There's no shame in not reading it.

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5/3/22

Something has irritated the scars on my upper right arm, turning them purple. When I notice this in the shower, I experience a fleeting moment of absurd hope, thinking it is possible to turn back time, for my scars to be lurid and fresh once more.

I'm dissatisfied with them lately, the way they've all gone silver, the way the ones on my legs have smoothed and flattened. They used to be dark, sometimes almost black when I came out of the shower, and the ones on my calves used to be raised like guitar frets, so firm they made a sound if I ran my fingers down them hard enough.

It's not the same now. My legs used to be a horror show. If you inspect them, you'll see the extent of what I did to myself, but it's not the shock it used to be.

Why do not want them to fade? One could come up with all sorts of unsavory conjectures, all of which would be at least half true. I'm trapped in time, obsessed with my teenage years because I feel disconnected from my past. I am uncomfortable with getting older. I'm attention-seeking, attempting to prove to the world and myself that I have suffered. I am a wannabe, participating in the self-harm suffering Olympics, trying to show that I had it worse than others.

The one on my mind lately is that I miss self-harm, I crave it. The other night I was so riddled with self-harm impulses I could hardly figure out what to eat. I was in the kitchen and the knife block was right there and I kept thinking but what if, could barely string together two thoughts in between the images and sensation of what I wanted to do myself. Creative new things I hadn't thought of as a teenager, or had been to afraid to try.

I got to bed without hurting myself, laid there trying to read War of the Worlds while the urges flashed through me like tics and twitches. My arms, my legs, my chest, all craving mutilation in little jolts. If I thought of myself, anytime I have ever been seen or heard to speak, the next thought would be -- oh, I shouldn't say. You're not supposed give people ideas.

I reached down the the scars on my outer thighs, so broad and hard, the gnarly crosshatch I barely remember inflicting. There's some small relief in that, knowing that it has happened. Old scars are like a ghost of what I crave, satisfying enough to get me to sleep at last.

Me and my scars in 2011 -- one of my favorite pictures I've ever taken of myself

6/10/22

Months ago, I had an idea for a post: an exploration of my self-loathing, because I've never seen anyone do it and I'm tired of the isolation and stigma that still surrounds the subject.

I have tried to write this post many times. Each time I wouldn't know what I was doing. My insecurity would crush me, convincing me that I'm just complaining aimlessly into the void. People will read my self-pity (That's what it is, right? There's nothing else here, right?) and hate me.

Maybe it'll work better now that the burden of self-loathing has lifted a little. I know it's temporary, brought on by certain happy events and the weather finally warming. I still battled shame over getting 5/6 on my Wordle this morning. Point is, nothing external can fix this. No matter how much success, how much affection, how much good weather, the self-loathing is still there. Dormant, perhaps, or weak, but always waiting to strike.

A dear friend recently told me he'd tried to read my blog but couldn't stand it because it was too intense, made him worry about me. My heart broke a little. I went and retrieved the therapy book I keep forgetting to work through (The ACT Workbook for Depression & Shame).

I don't want to worry anyone. I can't say I never did because I did have my manipulative moments, and sometimes, in high school, I was genuinely desperate for help. But there was a reason I used to hide the wounds and scars. I suppose there's a reason to show them too.

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5/3/22

I had an idea to make this post primarily about self-loathing, without talking too much about the self-harm, but I've given up. They're inextricable. I've been hurting myself since before I hated myself. My earliest recollections of self-harm start from around first grade, whereas the beginnings of my self-loathing are more uncertain.

It's not like I was born hating myself, or like my earliest memories are specifically marked with it. I remember being bullied in elementary school and my response being contradictory: either I would hate myself, falling in line with what I imagined to be my tormentor's viewpoint, or I would spend hours in focused, silent retaliation, asserting to myself why I was better. I don't know that the "or" even makes sense here, because these responses were often the same thing, e.g. me fantasizing about telling a bully that "maybe I should go suck on a tailpipe and die" as a way of showing both how she made me feel and how ridiculous her opinion of me surely was.

(In the end, it's all about the same thing: me either being worse or better than the people hurting me, or somehow both at once. It's not that I ditched one path for the other. I still lean on both for consolation at times, even though it's unhelpful and unhealthy to over-elevate or crush one's self-image.)

Meanwhile, I self-harmed by throwing myself on the floor, trying to hit my head; prodding at my skin harmlessly with pencils; twisting lanyards around my hand until it hurt. The first time I cut myself was in 6th grade, when I thought a friend was avoiding me. She wasn't, of course, but the fear gripped me so tightly I went down to the stream and scratched my knee with a piece of broken glass. (The first of many instances where I'm grateful and amazed I didn't contract tetanus). I hadn't gotten the idea from anyone else, I hadn't read any panicky articles about this new "self-mutilation" craze sweeping teens. I knew instinctively what I wanted.

The year was 2004. I hardly knew what I was getting into. As I continued the practice with new implements, I didn't realize I was hardwiring myself for deepening obsession, and that for whatever reason, the balance of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing would tip dangerously towards the latter.

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6/10/22

Just kidding, I know exactly what caused that tip. It feels so clear to me that it happened in 8th grade, when, for reasons I don't feel comfortable talking about, I cut off all my hair with a pair of scissors. Curls falling to the floor, where I left them for months as a reminder of my shame. Rumors spread about me in school. Strangers made jokes about my gender and sexuality (In the end they were kinda right -- now I'm agender and bi. Funny). I wanted to die, but I settled for giving myself nosebleeds in the shower and watching the blood pour down the drain. A secret, clean method. No one knew.

By 9th grade I'd formed a superstition that if I hurt myself, I would get my way. I had to pay in blood for anything to go well because otherwise I didn't deserve it. At the time, I was primarily concerned with romance, bleeding into the sink in exchange for a message on Myspace.

In 10th grade I tried to stop because a boyfriend asked me to. I became obsessed with the idea of someone I loved pinning me down and cutting tallies on my ribs. We weren't talking at the time and I fantasized about this contact, obviously the only kind I deserved. Being in a relationship meant being pressured into sexual activity long before I was ready. I'd dissociate afterwards, then go home, listen to MSI, and imagine this person, who I loved so sexlessly, punishing me like a revenging angel.

In the summer after 10th grade, the superstitions I'd developed got their narrative pay-off. In August, a month after I'd learned my family was moving to Australia, I went through a rough break-up and experienced an extravagance of manic behavior, formulating some elaborate time-based system of self-harm based around the number 21. If I did it just right, if I didn't eat or drink, he would take me back.

Then, that same week, a friend raped me. I tried to stop him from pulling up my shirt, but he tugged it out of my hands. He patronizingly kissed the mess of cuts on my stomach and kept going. Afterwards, I kissed him goodbye at the door, begged him not to tell anyone, and went upstairs to the bed covered in his semen to pay my penance on my skin.

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Did I choose this? I was a teenager -- thirteen to sixteen years old. If you had asked me what I wanted in life, I would've said I wanted to write and then sat on the fear that I wasn't good enough. If you had asked me what I thought I deserved in life, I don't know what I would have said.

My brain had this dark, dramatic predisposition to self-blame or self-aggrandizement. My attachment style was a nightmare. I thought lovability and worthiness must be externally earned, and would do anything, even things I didn't like, to gain that. I only tried to stop self-harming when boyfriends would say, "Please stop, for me." Otherwise, love was paid for in blood.

What tools did I have to counter my own mindset? How could I realize you can't stop hating or hurting yourself for anyone but yourself? How could I guess how far it would go, or how it would affect my biology as an adult?

I was seeing a therapist but I couldn't talk about my self-harm because I was afraid she'd tell my parents. I could never tell her the full truth.

When I told her that my family was moving to Australia, I spent the entire session curled up in a ball on the chair. "I'm looking at you curled up there," she said, "and I'm seeing what I'm worried will happen to you when you move, that you will curl up into yourself."

I didn't know at the time that she was right.

There was a time when I blamed myself for what happened when we moved to Australia, thinking, if only I had been more sociable, if only I'd tried a little harder with the friends I've since learned I can trust. Then I wouldn't have this trauma, these scars, this social anxiety.

But, looking back at the documentary evidence, I've discovered the truth that's honestly harder to swallow: I didn't have the tools, the abilities, the help. My trust in other people got severely burned. I snapped my hand away and curled around the wound. I sank deeper.

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2011

"#54
The realization:
'He didn't even use me as a person
I was just an
object, a trophy.
But he is still happy.
I am not.'
Blood, blood, blood
smeared over things so symbolic
of ruin and shame, of
don't let anybody in because
this lack of wisdom protects no emotions
so protect with
how much it would hurt to have
someone fucking between those torn thighs.
Punishment. Atonement.
The word 'FILTH' carved into pale flesh.
'He is happy, they are all
happy, having stepped on me.
And I am not.'
Red hand prints like all the
fiery, grasping claws of these men who can now brag:
            She was a bit of a
            bitch really.
            Asked too much
            wanted too much but
            at least her tits were nice
            at least I got to lay my hands
            here
            and here.
This terrible realization:
'I am not to be loved.
I am to be used so
they are happy.
I am not."

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6/13/22

Most of my scars are from after I moved to Australia. There was an abusive teacher, a persecutory school administration, homesickness, rumor-mongering, people who told me not to complain because people with cancer have it worse, the realization that what had happened in my bedroom on that summer day had been rape, the fallout of that which involved few people believing or supporting me or caring much at all. In my last year of school, I isolated myself so thoroughly that I didn't talk at all some days.

My apologies for exposing you to my old poetry, but I chose the poem above because of the contradiction in my thinking it illustrates. In the wasteland of rape trauma and social trauma, I struggled with how to view myself: was I a victim, clawed at by men, or was I somehow to blame, my inherent self an evil that warranted assault and dehumanization?

I mostly leaned towards the latter. How else was I to explain the way the world seemed intent on beating me as soon as I raised my head, striking me whenever I reached out a hand for comfort? How could so many people hate and mistreat and ignore me if it was unjust? I had to be evil, because then at least the world was right.

I often encounter rhetoric -- often from cis white men -- about not having a victim mindset, about how much better it is to view everything as a result of your own actions. It's not a horrible idea in moderation, but I used an anti-victimhood mindset to hate myself, but the truth was that there was no way for me to be in control.

How could I stop a friend from pulling out his penis when I said "no" already, when I was alone in the house with no one to stop him? How could I keep people from taking his side? How could I stop a teacher from bullying me when she got angry at me for looking in the wrong direction, holding a scrap of paper, crying from fear? How could I get my peers to like me and listen to me and believe me?

With the assumption that it must somehow be my fault even in situations where I had no agency, my reasoning became amorphous. The problem was me. I had to stop talking. I had to stop being myself. I had to cut the word "FILTH" into my thighs as a barrier to letting anyone else in ever again.

The other side of my old dichotomy was present too, of course. I demeaned the people of Perth, writing insulting (and bad) poetry about their supposed shallowness, narrow-mindedness, milquetoast and uncreative aesthetics. I had to be better them, since I couldn't be accepted them. If I wasn't better than them, I was worse.

Sometimes, the realization that I was a victim would break through. In moments of clarity, I would write rants against the teachers, the school administration, and the ones who had sexually exploited me. It's heartbreaking now to read those moments of balance, when I could see that I wasn't perfect but I wasn't evil either, that I was a full human and I didn't deserve this treatment. An afternoon here and there, then back to the usual.

I blamed myself as an adult too, posting apologies on Facebook for not being better when I was in Australia, flying into rages with myself for "causing my own trauma." Only in the past few years did I confront the idea that I was a victim. It was a horrifying realization, one that left me shaking and dissociating in the bath, at work, behind the wheel.

I never hear anyone talking about how difficult it is to accept that in some cases, you are a victim. You got run over in someone's path, it was unfair, and there's no justice or recourse. You were vulnerable, the world was unkind, and you were harmed, sometimes for no good reason.

I think anti-victimhood rhetoric is such an appealing illusion because, if you were never the victim, then surely you can take actions to prevent this ever happening again. It was all your doing, right? You're in control. It's also a viewpoint that's easily co-opted by capitalism and oppressive mindsets: if everything's your fault, then how can systemic forces be to blame? If you're suffering, poor, traumatized, you just should've done better.

In short, it's a mindset that benefits abusers and oppressors. Recognizing when you're a victim is empowering too. Finally, I can accept that I didn't deserve any of that mistreatment, and I should never accept it again.

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2011

"#48

RULES TO LIVE BY:

1. YOU ARE SCUM. Never forget what you are, never believe you are any good.

2. Always remember that NO ONE WANTS YOU. Your presence is a taint. Don't enter into a conversation unless addressed. No one wants to know.

3. DON'T ASK FOR THINGS. You don't deserve them.

4. DON'T HOPE. It's better this way. You can't be disappointed.

5. PAY THE PRICE. Sacrifices must be made. Blood is the price for good things in life.

6. NOTHING YOU DO IS EVER GOOD ENOUGH. You always need to try harder. You are always a failure.

The rules apply only to me: I am scum, I am the lowest."

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It hurt to rediscover that entry. I had forgotten just how bad it was back then.

I have a new perspective on it now, one that allows for forgiveness and acceptance for what I did to myself and others.

Read the rules to carefully, even if it's horrible. What am I trying to prevent with all this superstition and restriction? What was I trying to gain?

I wanted to be accepted by someone, anyone, to any degree. I wanted bad things to stop happening. I wanted to prevent the cruelty of others by anticipating what they'd see in me. I wanted good things to happen, so I resorted to magical thinking to foster them.

I was trying to take care of myself.

Self-hatred was self-love twisted on itself, molded and distorted by the treatment of others. Straightforward self-love felt (and still does) too dangerous. Setting boundaries, standing up for myself, voicing my opinions, crying for help, etc. had resulted too many times in my self and my needs and my voice being disregarded anyways. It felt like punishment. So, the solution? Stop doing that and life will get better.

It didn't of course. As I silenced and isolated myself, I became obsessed with Kurtz's gasping words from The Heart of Darkness: "Live rightly, die, die." Whatever it meant in the book, it meant to me that I was trying my hardest and still dying, that living "rightly" was killing me. The loneliness and self-loathing hurt so much the pain became physical, eating at my chest and skin. I thought I'd never live see the end.

Though the emphasis is slightly difference, ACT calls these confused acts of self-care "Defectiveness Coping Behaviors," pointing out that "You wouldn't have used these DCBs early on if they weren't effective." ACT also points out that these behaviors, while they temporarily relieve pain, are self-perpetuating. For example, my isolation increased my shame and fear of others, and it was only by breaking out of that (reaching out, dating, accepting friendships) that I improved my life at all.

And now, of course, these DCBs aren't helpful at all. They're a hindrance. So I need to learn to not act on them, even when they feel so tempting, so comforting, like an old blanket.

Still, it did work for a while. To this day I get dreamy for the memories of lonely trips to the city, dancing around to Public Image Limited while cottony seeds floated through the afternoon sunlight, watching my carnivorous plants grow and open when I couldn't. I wasn't happy, but it was beautiful, sometimes.

Doodled in class, 2011

6/14/22

I was in a good mood today, put on a cute outfit and Etat Libre d'Orange's perfume, The Ghost in the Shell. Smelling like a flowery android fresh off the production line, I drove around on errands blasting Ho99o9 and feeling like a cool and interesting person.

Too much positive feeling, I've realized, is overstimulating. Before long I just want it to stop because I want my normal life to resume. Within hours my brain feels like a peeled mandarin drying in the sun and my joy teeters towards anxiety.

In the quiet hours of the night I question myself, whether I was too annoying today, too loud or too quiet, too demanding. I see myself from the outside, sitting in the drivers' seat and radiating joy and wondering if all that excitement was unwise. The fan I bought to cool my study wasn't very good. I didn't hold my own in conversation. I don't know what I am any more, whether I exist. The day was too long.

I've had the comedown go worse than this. One moment I'm on top of the world, then the next my fist flashes out from the corner of my sight and catches me in the face. It can happen so fast I don't catch it, even though it's my own body. A trained reaction, punishing me for hubris as quickly as a dog salivates for the bell.

It's easier, less frightening, less dangerous, to between average and slightly sad, to keep myself below happiness, it not outright miserable.

Such unexpected self-harm is one of the many signs that I've teetered over the edge of my self-control. Something happens at the wrong time, I make a mistake on a day when I'm on edge, I'm too happy with too hard of a comedown, and I fall over the edge.

No one can reason with me and I can't reason myself, can't stop myself from doing and saying the most horrible things. I insult myself to anyone who will listen, I fight praise because it wells up waves of anger. I tell people they are crazy for loving me, that they should beat me, rape me, kill me, that they'd be better off without me. I hate myself so much it feels like I could just die with it. I know I'm making everyone miserable, but I don't know how to stop.

All the while, I know what will calm down my emotions, make me able to live with myself again. My mind stretches to every item in the room that could be used as a weapon. I feel them all around the house, arrayed, waiting. Knives, razors, heavy books, lighters, anything. Several times I've lunged for the knife block or started striking my head, and I've needed to be physically restrained.

In that moment, the self-loathing is completely true. I never feel anything else in life with such certainty as I feel, during these episodes, that I am scum of the earth, unlovable, that I caused my own trauma because I was too pathetic to accept that I deserved everything I got.

One time, after I'd recovered, Tim told me that the look in the eyes was the same was when I took too much LSD and didn't know my own name or birthday. I wasn't there. I was somewhere else.

Self-loathing isn't always like this. Most of the time, however, I don't entirely disagree with the self-loathing worldview, even when I'm in my right mind. Today, miraculously, I don't agree, which I think is a big step in the right direction.

Most of the time, self-loathing is subtle, the sub-conscious leading my actions. Last summer, I bumped a parked car while trying to pull out of a parking lot because I thought it would be cringe for me to have to add another point to an already messy turn. I wasn't conscious of it in the moment, and I only realized this by analyzing it later. This is the case with so many things: my fear of voicing what I want, my anxiety after the guests leave and I'm alone, the way I choose what to eat and when.

Often, I just get this feeling that I'm evil. Anxiety at everything I do, terror at the signs of my own existence. The trees in autumn become unreal, night falls heavy on my chest. I become unreal. At least, if I'm evil, I don't exist.

How do you counter this? I hit a roadblock with ACT because so much of it was based off addressing, naming, mocking, etc. the self-loathing part of your internal monologue. I don't have an internal monologue, which makes it tricky. Sometimes I can make a joke of it -- "I want to take a bath. Does that make me evil?" -- and that can help. But sometimes I don't feel like laughing.

It's a long road and I don't have all the answers. My point here is that it's not that I can just stop hating myself. This is how my brain works, deep down, in subtle ways I don't yet understand. It's been this way for so long that it's impossible to pin down how or why it started -- even all my explanations above are just theories.

To commit to improving this is to commit to countering yourself on a deep level, constantly. And it gets harder when you don't feel like you deserve to be saved.

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10/9/11

Back in 2011, after the worst of it was over, a friend who, the prior night, had seen my scars for the first time, asked me why I self-harmed. It turns out that the answer I gave was like 90% on the money. I'd summarize it as such:

1. I was giving and outlet to emotional pain in a way that I'd found to be effective, if horrific.
2. I did it out of self-loathing and self-destructive desires.
3. Self-harming out of a desire for self-punishment (I will teach myself never to do [x] again).
4. I took pride in my self-harm as something I was good at and something that made my life experience unique.
5. I sometimes self-harmed because I was seeking help without being able to ask.
6. Superstition and magical thinking -- blood in exchange for positive results in life.

There is one piece missing from this explanation, whether I was conscious of it at the time or not:
7. I was (and am) an addict.

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6/20/22

There's some debate, apparently, as to whether self-harm can be called an addiction. Speaking for myself only, I found it to be addictive, and find myself racked with cravings to this day.

I've been listening to the podcast Dopey ("The podcast about drugs, addiction, and dumb shit."), starting at the beginning. I'm still in the episodes from when Chris was alive, and at times I've been struck by his description of intravenous cocaine cravings: he doesn't crave the drug so much as the needle, the image of the needle puncturing his skin, the blood pulling into the barrel. He'd talk about how euphoric recall colored his memories of using, making the moment before the needle's plunge seem deliriously desirable, even when he knew that the following high was unpleasant and never worth it.

What is it that I crave? The feeling of something dangerous in my hand. A whole lot of visual stuff people hate for me to describe. The shock of mutilation, knowing I've gone too far and I can't take it back and I'll be suffering for this for days. My feelings flattening to blankness, the warmth and sleepiness that washes in as the blood drains out. The hard-gotten self-care of patching myself up, cleaning up the blood, watching the wound heal through its slow torments.

I don't remember so well the feelings of shame and panic that tend to follow the self-harm. Euphoric recall makes it hard for me to remember, even if those are essential parts of the experience.

It's not just negative feelings that cause these cravings. If I sit here and think about it too much, desire rolls over me like a wave. My skin itches and aches, my hands wring and my nails twist into my cheek. I can't sharpen knives, or even be near someone sharpening a knife, because it's too visceral, fills me with sensually intrusive thoughts. Sometimes I find myself in dark corners of Twitter, looking at images of self-harm with slavering obsession. Oh, wouldn't it be nice? Don't you miss it, Lyra?

There is, potentially, an explicable mechanism for self-harm addiction. In response to the wound, your system floods with endorphins. Half the time, I wouldn't even feel pain at what I was doing to myself. Riding my feelings, I'd go until the calmness of endorphins seeped in. I'd become exhausted, heavy, a feeling like being wrapped in a blanket. It would be hard to get myself cleaned up and easier to sleep. Sometimes, in the years of insomnia in Australia, it was the only thing to help me to sleep, when melatonin and dipenhydramine and Zopiclone couldn't.

Nowadays, when the madness sets in, when I shift into that negative world where my own worthlessness feels like the only truth, I get so frustrated that there is nothing I can do about it. Normal coping mechanisms don't do much. I can be hamstrung for the rest of the day, trying to wait it out. Lying in bed, waiting to see if I can sleep it off. In college, it would go on for a week at a stretch, the slow, grating hours scraping into days.

I am not supposed to self-harm. Everyone gets upset when I do it (a reason I usually find more compelling than "But it's dangerous and you should love yourself"). I know it works, that it's the only thing that flicks the switch and shuts me down, and in those moments I can argue extremely eloquently as to why I should be allowed to do it. In lieu of doing whatever I want, I wish sometimes that I had done more damage to myself as a teen, so I'd have more scars and horror stories.

I also relate heavily with Of Herbs and Altar's wise words on the subject of missing your Eating Disorder. The parts that stuck out to me was how he talks about calorie-counting can be so all-consuming that it leaves little room for other emotions, and how life becomes so simple when your focus is so narrow.

Self-harm was much the same for me. I've come to miss those times when I had no thoughts for the future because I didn't think I'd be alive, when my sole focus was doing as much damage to myself, engaging in as much of this addictive, self-destructive behavior as I could humanly manage, with little regard to the long term consequences. It was a life without nuance: I was evil, and I needed to be punished, and I was good at punishing myself. I had a skill, and in my self-centered concept of the universe, it was a useful one.

In contrast: adulthood, with its responsibilities to others, financial considerations, conversations of where we will be in a few years, the struggle of accepting yourself as an imperfect human being with flaws that you must either confront or accept, the realization that you are not even uniquely evil. No, you're just a person.

If I were to give in, pursue the path of self-destruction again, I wouldn't have to worry about all that any more. I know all the tricks of self-harm. I'm proficient and don't have to fumble through the basics. If I wanted to, I could show people the resulting damage, and they would scramble to make me better.

My life is no longer built for that. I can't self-harm in desperate isolation. There's people around me now, and I hate frightening them. I resent it sometimes, but they're helping to keep me safe without even knowing it.

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I saw this comic bouncing around on Tumblr for a while, but of course haven't seen it since I decided to write this. In it, Person 1 makes a self-deprecating remark, "Haha I'm so stupid," or something. Person 2, frowning in my recollection, nails a board with a positive affirmation on it over Person 1's speech bubble with.

On Tumblr I think it came with an assertion that "no, you do not get to keep your unhealthy coping mechanism," and maybe some talk of how self-deprecation -> self-hatred and harshly-worded, even disdainful insistence you need to work on yourself if you ever want to get better (and, supposedly, removing negative self-talk is the way to do it).

There's an aggression/tough love approach to these depictions and conversations that makes me wildly uncomfortable. I get that self-deprecating humor is uncomfortable and annoying for others, but this reads to me as an effort to link irritation with a moral exhortation to Do Better. Stop feeling this way, or at least expressing it, because it's bothering the people around you.

It reminds me of when my Self-Loathing Containment System TM experienced an unexpected breach and a friend responded angrily, saying, "No, you don't get to say that about my friend!" I spiraled for days. What was the point of friends if they didn't want to know what was going on inside me, what it was like to actually be me?

It reminds me of people telling me I needed to shut up because there were others out there who had it worse. It reminds me of people who let me fall by the wayside when my emotions became too much for anyone to handle. It reminds me of people who found my expressions of unhappiness annoying, and so cast me to the side rather than helping. But hey, maybe that's the trauma talking.

I see the good intent here. You want your loved ones to love themselves, and for that to be evident. But if the end result is, effectively, silencing someone, I don't see what good that's doing. If someone is already angry with themself, is you being angry at them going to help?

Season 2 of Euphoria was a (very fun) mess, but the scene where a bunch of influencers scream at Kat to "LOVE YOURSELF!" was so on point that it had me sitting there with my mouth hanging open saying, "Finally, someone said it!"

This intense pressure to love yourself can become just another stick to beat yourself with. It's framed as a choice -- just do it! It's easy! Just drop that self-loathing and love yourself! So, when I'm in those borderline psychotic states of self-loathing, I find myself blaming myself for not making the simple choice of loving myself. If I loved myself, this wouldn't be happening! I wouldn't be taking up so much of someone else's attention! I wouldn't be such a nuisance!

"Love yourself!"

The fist comes flying out of the corner of my vision. Bam!

"You're a good person!"

Bam!

"Why can't you just be a good person!"

Bam!

"No one cares if you feel this way! No one wants to hear it! You'll pretend like you're happy and no one will ever need to know!"

Bam!

And so on. I've literally hurt myself while my brain seethes with affirmations. Whatever works for others, it doesn't do it for me. CBT and similar feel too much like gaslighting to me.

My therapist has given me the more achievable goal of self-neutrality, to be pursued with ACT, which to me is more about accepting that you're going to feel like shit sometimes and not letting that get in the way of my day-to-day life as much as possible, and accepting when it does. She has agreed with my suspicion that likely I'll never be entirely rid of my self-loathing, but perhaps it'll be more manageable, and the dips into madness will happen less often and I'll be better at handling them when they do.

I think self-love is so popular nowadays because it's marketable, because it makes good content for viral posts, because wouldn't be nice if all the discomfort and trauma just disappeared? I've seen it work for some, but it seems too far to reach for me. At least for now, I'm afraid I'll overextend.

I feel safer when someone lets me feel the way I feel, provides a soft (yet maybe slightly resistant) surface for my sharp words. That's a lot to ask of someone: that they not get upset or angry, that they tell me that they understand my feelings and disagree as gently as possible, even if my self-loathing batters against everything they believe. I'm a lot to deal with, I know.

I wish for people to be kind, to understand that I didn't adopt this viewpoint willingly, and certainly not to annoy and upset people. It was all quite logical at the time. There was a time when it was all that got me through. Undoing these patterns will, perhaps, take the rest of my life. It can't be countered with pithiness.

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Oh, I could talk about it all day. If it were acceptable, if there weren't concerns about triggering people or giving them dangerous knowledge, I'd spend all day writing down everything I've done, whispering it like a spell. Thinking about it, my skin is alight. I can feel old sensations lining my skin. I want it back, I want it all back.

But you can't dwell on it forever, can you? After a while it gets boring. After a while, I just want to drink tea, read a book, and go to bed. I want to life to continue.

↜↝

Today, I blew a tire while driving. This is the third one. I was so upset with myself, so disgusted with my sweat and my inability to loosen the bolts on the wheel, that I thought I'd rather die than ask for help. Help came anyways and I returned home aching for the sharp little knife in the knife block. I told Tim exactly what I thought myself, how it was time I gave up driving even if I enjoyed it because I'm a menace and cost us too much money.

I couldn't let it go. If I forgave myself then -- then -- then what? The universe would round on me and punish me because I didn't do it enough myself. Tim would hate me. Everyone would hate me. My sense of self would collapse. The horror of what laid beyond just forgiving myself nearly stopped me.

But, slowly, I relented. Tim asked me for a hug. Face buried in his shoulder, I allowed myself to ask him what I had been wanting:

"Do you want to order pizza tonight?"

"Sure, I'll exploit your bad feelings to feed my desires for trash."

"So long as you're exploiting me," I joked.

We laughed about it and tears squeezed out of my eyes. Already it was passing. I took a bath and used one of my precious bath bombs to treat myself. We had pizza and watched two episodes of Breaking Bad back-to-back. Despite my paranoia that I need to be working basically all the time, I've written close to 3,000 words tonight.

I think, for now, I'm doing a little better.