Healing Takes Time
Rivers know this; there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
—A. A. MILNE
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE
Here we are: almost all the way out of self-loathing. Almost all the way to medium. To get this far, you went back into your own past to meet yourself again as you were then. Reaching back to seize your younger hand, you resisted your urge to turn and run. You made yourself watch yourself almost die ten thousand times. You sat back there as your own witness, seeing what was, grasping the truth with which you set yourself free.
Which is, if you think about it, quite an achievement.
Okay, then.
Now what?
Because at this point you might be thinking: If I’ve discovered so much, if I’m now so smart, why do I still hurt like hell?
This is the question of the century. We who have hated ourselves ask it every day.
Work hard at anything—completing tax forms, mining copper, cleaning house—and you might justifiably believe that you deserve a prize, a celebration, a reward. Work hard at understanding why we hated ourselves and what happens?
Well, in a best-case scenario, we stop hating ourselves. Done. You can close this book and have some fun.
But, better than anyone else, we know: Best-case scenario? Don’t make me laugh. Because things rarely go as planned.
This is the point at which we have to choose. Hating ourselves was not at first a choice. It was forced on us. But beyond the Land of Now You Know, self-loathing is a choice. Now that we know all we know, we heal if we choose to heal.
Healing takes time.
The act of escaping from self-loathing is not a sudden stroke of good fortune like winning the lottery or having a life-saving operation. One is not transformed, fixed, all set forever overnight. Escaping from self-loathing is a slow and steady journey on a bumpy, vaguely uphill grade. You go a ways. You stop. You go a ways, remaining ever sensitive (although less than before) to certain triggers—gestures, places, words—but treating yourself like a buddy who has certain sensitivities. You go a ways. You learn. You go a ways. You stop, fall, and freak out. You get up. Go a ways. You go.
It takes time because, enchanted, we had a problem but did not know what it was. Had you asked me ten years ago What is your problem? I would have said: My problem is that I am ugly and incompetent and gross.
Leaving the prison of self-loathing feels at first like losing our minds because we see in such sharp relief what we put up with for so long.
Awareness cannot cure us instantly because habits are hard to break. We hated ourselves for so long that, were we not extremely careful henceforth, we run the risk of hating ourselves reflexively. We do not want or plan to hate ourselves. Who would? We say Tsk-tsk, not gonna hate myself this time. But then. And then. At least at first, we have to watch our every move.
It takes time because we have been harming ourselves so fervently and in so many places for so long. Some of us have spent our whole lives committing suicide.
And some of us survived.
• • •
But oh, the wait.
Spellcasters put us here. Consigned us to this darkness, whether they meant to or not. And we stayed here mainly by our own unwitting will. We slumped in resignation, as if drugged, or shook with misdirected rage. But mainly we mistook waiting for life.
Could we still call it patience when we did not know that we were even waiting, much less what we were waiting for? When in fact we were really biding time, scolding ourselves? Such darkness is narcotic, numbing us to our wounds and the ticking of the clock.
After she was raped by a fan at age twenty-one, the singer Tori Amos spent many years struggling to regain her sexual trust and sense of self.
“To heal the wound, you have to go into the dark night of the soul. . . . It’s taken me a long time to be a woman,” Amos said fifteen years after the rape. “I have a really good shrink, and we started ‘beading a necklace,’ as she calls it. This much at a time: a little bead here, a little bead there—a memory, a moment, and then one day something shifted. You can get there. You can get there.”
Waiting, waiting, forever waiting: it would be forever too had we said nothing, done nothing, to save ourselves. Had we not shrieked at each other and at ourselves: Wake up. Wake up and call yourself by name, as do those who know they exist.
Waiting, waiting, forever waiting, but for what? We dared not wonder, dared not know, for knowing would reveal the magnitude of what has never been and what might never be, or worse: what has been which we missed. By miraculous intervention and true grit we crawled out of the dark, and then into the light only to see how late it was. We felt exactly as one might after sitting through an entire fireworks show with eyes closed, opening them only at the final moment as the last sparkles dissolve. We thought: Too late. We thought: I should have kept my eyes shut, because it hurts to know what I missed.
Would it be better never to have known?
One never wishes one could wear cashmere if one has never heard of it. One never regrets never having swum the turquoise waters off Oahu if one has never heard of Oahu. Are those who never heard of Oahu better off or worse than those who know the name Oahu yet have never been? Which ones are cursed, which blessed? Because now that we are out of the darkness, we must face the fact that we might know too much.
And can you handle that? This knowledge blinding as the sun?
You can. It’s not too late. Remember the expression He who laughs last, laughs longest? That’s us—the ones who laugh last. In which case, we win. Those who never hated themselves have laughed and laughed. Lucky them. We who laugh last are just learning how. But with the incandescent wonder that surrounds the new. It’s our turn.
Laugh.
• • •
Identify your saints.
You have known spellcasters. You have known spellcasters’ assistants. You have known the ones who harmed you on purpose or accidentally, the ones who watched and did nothing at all.
But all along that path, you have had heroes. Saviors. Saints. They were the ones who saw and understood, the ones who looked you in the eye. The ones who tried.
Your saints might not have been the most prominent people in your life—the most physically present, longest-term, or closest kin. Some of them drifted through, some hovered briefly. Some you never even knew.
After one of the most humiliating events of my life—wetting myself in a middle-school history class because self-loathing made me too afraid to ask for permission to go to the restroom—my teacher, quietly appalled, sent me to the school nurse.
This nurse’s name was Mrs. Holcomb. On that Day of Great Humiliation, she was about forty, with short, curly brick-red hair.
Giving me soap and washcloths and a clean new pair of gym shorts from a stack of such things she kept in a drawer, she let me sob.
Have a good cry, she said. And then:
I’m a square-dancer, Mrs. Holcomb said. My husband, Ace, and I, we square-dance every Sunday at the club. We sure have fun! Okay, one Sunday we were dancing when somebody made a joke. I don’t remember what it was about—some little thing. One of the ladies—my friend Janice—laughed. She got the giggles and she laughed so hard! Yes, guess what happened. Just like you! She couldn’t help it, right there in her pretty square-dance outfit in the middle of the floor. She was embarrassed! Yes! But you know what? We said: Don’t worry, honey, this could have happened to anyone.
Because it could! Mrs. Holcomb handed me a Kleenex. See?
Which was exactly the right thing to say to me right then. So Mrs. Holcomb, dead or alive, is a saint.
My friend Ruby finds her saints in films.
“During an especially bad period of my life a few years ago, I watched a lot of war movies, because the best ones glorify the incredible endurance people have shown in wars, knowing that they cannot win personally, or that they might not live to see victory, but that they must do their humble part,” Ruby told me. “Besides which, they tend to put one’s own problems into perspective! The Great Escape is a good example of this, or The Dirty Dozen.
“One of my favorites is the Cold War series The Sandbaggers. The protagonist has failed at many things and knows it; he is all too aware of his own flaws. He had a disastrous marriage, and once he bungled a mission because he was drunk and got someone killed—because of this he never touches alcohol. But he knows that his work in the British Secret Service is important, much more important than his own life or his own ego, and so he keeps on getting out of bed every morning and giving his all. This is something that often gets me through: remembering that I can still achieve something of use to the world even if I personally am not what I would have wanted to be.”
Who were your saints and why? How can you honor them today?
• • •
And now, recovery: Chronic sorrow is a strange thing from which to have to free oneself because it is such a silly thing to have. That’s it, a silly thing. Almost a sin. Why on earth would most of us suffer chronic sorrow, in this country, in this age of high science and luxury? Why you? Why me? Because we were put under spells.
How do snakes feel while shedding their skins? How do caterpillars feel while turning into butterflies? We cannot ask. They cannot tell.
The trouble with being in a cocoon is that, for a while at least, you are transitional. The only thing you know for sure is that you are no longer a caterpillar. Not yet a butterfly, but close; it’s going to happen, whether you plan for it or not. You are changing from within. Old parts in there are withering and vanishing—like extra legs.
Soon you will dry your fresh wings in the sun. And then take flight.
• • •
And we feel naked, stupid, scared.
Forging our post–self-loathing selves feels like starting from scratch. It isn’t, because our real selves whom we were born to be are in there somewhere.
And some of us can only conjure up worst-case scenarios.
Long ago, in my “time before,” when I was still my true self, daydreams danced in my head. Buried under every four-leaf clover was a castle. In beach breezes I heard sea-gods wielding whelk shells, blasting warnings. I thought pigs the size of pinkies walked around tiny Londons and Tokyos under our beds as we slept, and left us notes inscribed on scrolls that most mistook for dust. I thought of fruit-punch fountains, magic horseshoes, phantom ships. I thought birds talked to me, their black eyes desperately urging me to understand.
I lived in dreams, but tell your dreams too often to the wrong people—because they bade you tell them—and they will be used against you. Did you fail that math test, Mom asked, because you were thinking about punch fountains? You come to understand that fantasies are one more thing for which you can and will be punished, one more thing by which you can be judged.
You come to understand that fantasies are flights away from them, your spellcasters, and thus fantasies are abandonments. You feel guilty for this. You come to understand that dreams can save you only for a while, but then you must return to the real world. To them. And then.
You come to understand that your spellcasters can read your mind, or at least they say they can, the same way God hears prayers. If they can read your mind, then they can see your dreams. You do not want this. You stop dreaming.
Your spellcasters demand, Tell the truth! You come to understand that fantasies are not the truth. In which case they are lies. And lies are crimes. Mom said liars are worse than thieves. Thus fantasies are burglaries.
“Life is a dream,” Virginia Woolf wrote. “’Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
We cannot fantasize because we think we have no right to secrecy or privacy, that were our dreams revealed the world would say: How silly. How seditious. How perverse.
Some of us have forgotten how to picture happiness. We have beaten it out of ourselves. We think the only safe dreams are dreams about what could possibly go wrong because these are not fantasies per se. They are penalties. Plans.
Like cult members, we have been told to fear the outside world. We do. Dreams are the world outside the outside world. We fear ourselves in the unknown. We fear the unknown in ourselves.
But see, your dreams have been there waiting for you all along. Those tiny pigs are still under the bed. Those fruit-punch fountains flow. You left them, but they lived, hoping for you. They knew.
• • •
The last time I talked with my mother before the delirium began that stayed with her for three weeks until she died, she told me: I feel like a sack of shit. Because that’s what I am.
Many of her worst fears had come true. She had been correct all along!
When she became delirious, I took her to the hospital. By then, she had no idea who I was and never would again. I sat beside her bed, watching hospital staff whisk in and out, arranging tubes.
At first, her slack face was a mask, vouchsafing not a single clue.
And then she started speaking. Urgently, albeit still delirious, she said:
Can I go now? Where is the boss?
I started typing everything she said. For three days, I did this.
Hello, take your scissors, she said, staring straight ahead. She never looked my way. Patrick! she said as if to someone standing there. You never know when you will need your scissors.
We received a package just now. It contained crystal and rubber. Hello! I said hello! Has he moved to Palm Springs? How are you today, sir? Joe? You have a midget dog? Oh help yourself.
Her hands moved, pantomiming slicing cake.
What’s your idea of fun? she asked, still staring straight ahead, looking intensely curious. Oh, Max is waving to me! Anyone else wanna give me a hug or a shake?
And I thought: Who the hell is this? Why did I never know this cheery, breezy, party-going soul? This smiling, carefree, pleasant total stranger?
This was she as she would otherwise have been. If she had never been enchanted. This was herself not hating herself.
Joy, can you cut a piece for me? Oh really? Herbie—this is a sort of parade. Help me get on the ship. A Spanish-speaking lady needs to breathe.
• • •
How many years did you waste on self-loathing? How many more will you waste? Say it together: Not one minute more.
What have we sacrificed for our self-loathing? What did we give away? What did we give up? What did we miss that others experienced under similar circumstances save one difference between us and them? A difference neither of appearance, aptitude, nor heritage, nor anything that could be measured with a microscope or MRI machine. The difference between us and everyone who has never hated themselves cannot be measured scientifically. Were we to all stand side by side, we would look much alike. Shoulders somewhat more slopey on the post-self-loathers, maybe? Shyer smiles?
Deep down, in our vestigial hopeful places, most of us have always known that we were not so horrible. We just could not accept, admit, apply, or even bear to think these words. We knew them with a kind of certainty that hummed almost inaudibly, then sometimes bloomed, then burned up swiftly like old film in a projector, flap flap flap.
We could not fight to save ourselves, because the rule was that we could not fight, that we would always lose. Whatever happened, they would pound us to the ground.
Now when you wake, rules break. First with a whoosh came the words I am not so horrible, and you believe it now. And oh:
I have suffered for nothing.
This concept could set us free. Suffered? For nothing? Well, jeez, stop—just as, the instant you realize a rock is in your shoe, you shake it out. Ouch! Not one millisecond more!
But say you had walked with that rock inside your shoe for five blocks. Say you had walked that way for five miles. Say you had walked that way for fifty miles and never shook it out. Because you did not know it was a rock, you believed it was part of you. Because you did not know you could. Good riddance, while still good, is weighted with regret. Because we are at last awake and the first rule of wakefulness is stop hating yourself, we must with all our might battle the impulse to blame ourselves for walking all those miles with that rock. Because self-blame, in the final analysis, is the very thing we’re trying to shake out.
You know how good it feels to remove a rock from your shoe? Remember doing that? Sheer bliss, better than walking in those same shoes had they never held a rock. Because—that rock taught you what hurting was. No rock, you never would have known.
Lesson complete. Shake, shake.
• • •
I am not absolutely cured.
I am significantly better. I no longer hate myself. I would no longer run around the house jabbing my stomach with a knife. I can say no. I am at medium sometimes. Most of the time.
I cannot pretend to be absolutely cured.
I cannot lie and say: Do exactly what I did and you will be cured.
I cannot lie because lies literally made me sick. The more I lie, the sicker I will stay.
I must be honest with you—and myself. This too is part of the new post–self-loathing me: truth. Telling the truth about my weaknesses makes me less weak. Funny how that works. An anti-vicious cycle. An elysian wheel.
I cannot lie and tell you I am absolutely cured but I can say: I’m better.
This is big. That I can walk and talk without fearing what others will say: this is epiphanic. Otherworldly. This is big.
We who hate ourselves are like people born with perfect vision who were prescribed horror-colored glasses long ago, and squinted at the world through them for years. Remove those glasses. You can see.
How did my own mother do this to me? How could she? How did she become this way herself? She was teased as a child for being overweight. Was this enough to wreck her life, then ripple through and ruin mine? I suspect not. I suspect something else happened to her back then, something much worse, but we will never know. She never spoke of it. She was brave to have hated herself so much yet stayed here so long.
Sometimes, these days, soft sea foam sweeps the sparkling sand and swathes my feet as I stand not regretting things. Instead, I can just stand there smelling salted air. That this happens even at least sometimes is huge.
Who is this medium-size figure standing on the sand, whose grains the afternoon sunshine turns copper, emerald, electrum, gold? Whoever she is, she is not as she once was. She is not always thinking awful things about herself. She is not always thinking awful things. She is not always thinking of herself. What joy, that there is such a possibility as joy.
I wear prescription glasses, take allergy pills, and obscure certain scars with cream. No product I can buy would fix my self-esteem. There is no simple fix. Exhorting me to have high self-esteem, just have it, is like telling me to just read magazines without my glasses. Some would tell me to smile into mirrors, as my friend Kelly used to do, saying Hello, beautiful. Hello, beautiful. That approach is overkill. I would die laughing first.
To flourish as ourselves, to simply be ourselves, we must conquer the selves that war against ourselves. We have no choice.
We have no choice in this world but—in this and this alone—to give ourselves no choice.
Stop thinking of yourself. This will feel weird at first, then like relief.
Interrupt the self-loathing voice, then in those split seconds of peace remind yourself that in the world at large, nothing has much to do with you.
Ironically, this works.
Realize your insignificance to the stars and the cosmos, your tininess compared to the magnitude of just one sea.
Then look around and ask yourself: Is this in any way—in any any any way—a nice day? Sure it is. Do you have money in your pocket? Do you not have leprosy? Are your children alive? Is your town not under invasion? Can you see trees? Can you see?
Aha!
This is more work than most folks do all week. Yet we who are in recovery from low self-esteem must do it many times each day. This is what separates us from the world. This work. What others receive automatically—the optimism, confidence, and self-acceptance that they take for granted—we wrest from the world only through daily knock-down, drag-out fights. Upside: this makes us treasure our hard-won joys more. We take no laugh for granted. For us, Have a nice day is a battle cry.
I raise that battle cry and tell myself it makes me strong. The yellow smiley faces on the blanket on my bed are kitsch but also not. I tell myself that every split second in which I save myself again is an epiphany.
I am not absolutely cured, but I have this. Five dollars in my pocket, and no leprosy.
How did I get here? Not by chanting Hello, beautiful.
I got here nice day by nice day, cool breeze by cool breeze. Tiny victory by tiny victory. My education is my scrutiny of normal people doing normal things. Their normalcy in its simplicity is holy. I watch a girl on a bus brushing her hair, cocking her head at her reflection in the window glass with neither love nor hate. I think: I want to be like her. I watch a chef cooking food at a restaurant and I can tell he is not thinking about himself. He is too busy, too interested in his work. I think: I want to be like him. Sometimes, I am.
And glad.