A Catalogue of My Most Hated Facets
Every once in awhile, I am reminded of all of the things I’ve learned and picked up along the way that I’m not proud to have as a habit and behavioral pattern. And then, it comes like a hurricane. In the eye of it, I find enough energy to do something about it at my deepest lows — but it doesn’t mean I can do something constructive about it.
All I know is how to hate myself. I saw it carried out by my parent in my most formative years. It is literally all I know. My twenty-five years on Earth have taught me extremely efficient ways of hating myself, from starving myself, to binge-eating, to going into bouts of being apologetic for absolutely everything, to burning and cutting and hitting.
And now I am willing to say, enough is enough. It cannot go on any longer.
My thought pathways have become manageable since I’ve started taking SSRIs. I don’t fly into an abyss of despising myself physically at a moment’s notice from one of my thousand-some triggers. But I still see all the terribly unhealthy ways of self-hatred affecting every bit of my life today.
The crux is not to hate myself further for them. For instance, I have a terrible obsessive behaviour of worrying myself to death when I express that I love someone and do not hear it. It goes back to my teenaged years in practice — but it is rooted in my greatest fears as a child. I’ll go Freud on my own shit to call it out now, in that I grew up with my greatest fear being that I’d lose the person I love the most. That they won’t be there in the morning. That I spent countless nights worrying when she’d drunken herself senseless, taken boatloads of pills, and when she’d tell me to fuck off if I told her I loved her in this state.
Fast forward to now, and I project this on everything around me. It may not be straight up Oedipean, but in the back of my head, I feel redemption for all those times my mother failed to deliver on that front.
And godsdamnit, I am not proud of that.
It’s extremely hard not to hate myself for it. Do you see the spiral I find myself trapped in every time this happens?
I love someone → I get deeply saddened when I feel like I’m not loved, for the silliest reason → I realise what I’ve become and flip my shit → I hate myself for what I become → someone loves me → All is well. Rinse and repeat.
But now is the time. I’m seriously not proud of this habit, no matter how little control I had in forming it. I know it’s not my fault. But it’s my legacy and my ugly inheritance. And it’s my responsibility to fight it tooth and nail until I just don’t do it anymore. Now is just the time, while I can see the pattern and the writings on the wall for all of the relationships and friendships I’ve fucked up because of it, that there is nothing constructive in hating myself for it, nor in apologising profusely, to just buckle down and do work. I will not fall victim to the trap that my mother’s illness laid for me. I know right now that this is life-threatening and serious.
