All Your So-Called “Personality Flaws” Are Actually Just Clever Coping Mechanisms
The worst form of slavery is that of the slave who has lost knowledge of being a slave.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Spells notwithstanding, damage done, we with low self-esteem are individuals—not faceless, marching myrmidons. You and I neither walk nor talk alike. We prefer different syrup brands. Were we to meet, we might never be friends.
Yet in some ways we are identical.
We say, think, and do some of the exact same things in the exact same situations. We share a set of definitive habits and quirks because we hate ourselves. We might not realize that we have these habits, much less that we share them with so many others, much less that they mark us as members of the Self-Loathing League. But we could recognize each other by them if we tried.
Now I can spot these “tells” from miles away. For most of my life I just had them.
Even if you know you have these habits, you probably don’t know why. You probably just hate them along with everything else you hate about yourself.
But these habits are not “bad,” not flaws, in and of themselves. They’re simply symptoms of self-loathing. Red flags. Coping mechanisms. Cries for help. We use them, albeit unwittingly, to navigate this crowded, seemingly punishing world. As long as you hate yourself, you will keep these habits—need them, even, to survive.
The most effective way to break them is not to address them only as themselves but as symptoms, offshoots, of our self-loathing. Trace them to their source, the source they share, and tackle that.
Imagine these habits as garden plants. Each of them looks entirely unique, with its own bizarre array of leaves, stalks, flowers, and/or fruit. Yet all these plants are growing from the same seed, buried underground: one giant, toxic seed.
Which is to say: Supplant the seed. Dig deep, destroy it, and these plants in all their poison-fruited finery will die.
Breaking these habits we share will not make us perfect. But each one we break brings us closer to our true selves and our “times before”—before our every act was shaped by shame.
I would bet my left arm that you are not nearly as bad as you believe you are. No, seriously. Left arm. Gone, if you are even half as gross or unacceptable as you insist.
Perfection is not possible. Perfection was never the point.
Now, how are you and I alike?
The summer I turned seventeen, I took a cross-country bus tour with twenty other kids. Our first day on the bus, an adorable surfer sat beside me. I could not believe my luck. We talked awhile, then he folded his arms across his chest.
You contradict yourself, he said. I mentioned Pink Floyd. You said Pink Floyd was your favorite band. I mentioned Jethro Tull. You said THEY were. I mentioned Syd Barrett and you had no idea who he was! The founder of Pink Floyd is who! I said I smoke dope. You said you do too. I said I had some we could smoke. Then you said dope makes you break out in hives. What is it with you? he demanded. Why are you so wishy-washy?
He was too well-bred to say You lie. But that was what he meant.
What could I say?
That I lied to him because he was cool and cute, so I would say whatever I believed might make him like me, even just accept me, even if it wasn’t true?
That I lied to him for the same reasons I lied to almost everyone: because I had no real convictions of my own, no beliefs beyond I am bad, because I was raised to deny, dismiss, disown all my beliefs? So now I really do not have a favorite band, and really neither smoke dope nor do not smoke dope. I am that pliable, that vacant, that blocked, and that blank. In which case these so-called lies are not technically lies at all. They are true and false, and neither true nor false.
Or could I tell him I lied to him because anything approaching truth about myself was automatically, by virtue of approaching truth about myself, repulsive? That a sodium pentothal injection might spur me to say my favorite band was neither Pink Floyd nor Jethro Tull but some other band he had not mentioned, would not mention, a band neither great nor wretched in the scheme of things but, since I admired it, rendered ridiculous? Because whatever I liked I must also somewhat hate?
I could not tell him that because I did not know. Not yet. No matter, anyway. He stood and strode away to find another seat, perhaps next to a girl with enough self-esteem to tell him she thought Pink Floyd sucked. In other words, the type of girl guys like. Questions like the ones he asked, I now realize, are merely tests of honesty. It matters not what your musical taste is, only that you have the self-respect to tell the truth. If I had only known that then, I might be married to a surfer.
Why lie? Every time we lie to others, we have already lied to ourselves.
As businessman Hank Rearden philosophizes in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged: “People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked. . . . The man who lies to the world is the world’s slave from then on.”
That’s why it’s so hard to stop lying. Each lie is another sticky spider-strand, connecting everything to everything. Lying is no mere habit. It’s a way of life. If you have lied for long enough, lies leap from your lips faster than the truth.
Let’s borrow a technique from cognitive behavioral psychology. Whenever you catch yourself lying, exact a small penalty upon yourself, something slightly embarrassing and/or uncomfortable. Jump up and down. Flick your wrist with a fingernail. Enough to make you wonder next time: Is it worth it? Because there I go again.
Mom lied to many people, even me. She always felt she had so much to hide. And yet she warned me that not only should I never lie to her, but also I could never lie to her, because with one glance into my eyes she would read my mind and know.
She told me in a voice like wheels on gravel: You’re a liar and liars are worse than thieves.
She told me I must never lie to her—but lying to others, if it gained me approval or high grades, was fine. Sometimes she supplied lies for me. Tell Julie you cannot attend her birthday party because you must help your father paint a wall. Tell Miss Tanaka that you sewed this blouse all by yourself.
A child who is perpetually lied to learns to lie, through imitation just as Korean babies learn to use chopsticks and speak Korean. Would it have been so terrible to tell the truth instead?
Well, yes. Because we hated ourselves, lying was our lifestyle. The truth left us too open to criticism, too out of control. With lies, we could corral what others thought of us. Or so we thought.
But when lies are your lifestyle, truth and untruth mix, even in your own mind, spurring the Uncertainty Curse. Every lie is a lost opportunity to learn. I have lied too much in this life.
That is the truth.
Too often. Always. Even when we are not wrong.
You had to watch your step with my former coworker Jed.
He was always sorry. He always told you how sorry he was. He apologized while he was with you. Later he would apologize to you again.
Sorry I interrupted you. Sorry I might have had bad breath. Sorry I bored you, wore the wrong clothes, talked too little or too much. Sorry I didn’t ask about your cat. Sorry I paid your way. Sorry I made you pay.
He couldn’t help it. He was beaten as a child. By someone who, by the time I met Jed, had been dead for decades. Did Jed think his old tormentor would rear up out of the earth and criticize him still? It was exhausting, his constant apologies. You’d say hello. He would apologize. You’d wonder what you did to make him abject, which made you abject. Then you avoided him.
But who am I to argue? I apologize compulsively myself.
I spent a weekend with relatives at their cabin in the woods. They love their cabin and the woods. Tall trees, a river, deer. They asked what I wanted to do that weekend, what I most wanted to see.
And in a tiny voice, knowing it was a mere ten-minute drive over the ridge, I said, The beach.
Of course! they said.
We packed a picnic lunch.
And on the wild Pacific shore, my favorite place in all the world, I said, This is so beautiful. Forgive me.
What? They looked around, as if for hidden cameras.
I’m sorry, I said.
They chewed their sandwiches. Sorry for what?
I wanted to say: Could it be any more obvious? Sorry to be so selfish, dragging you here from the forest to the sea, which you love too but less.
Wave after perfect wave crashed, glassy green.
How could my hosts possibly understand? How could they ever comprehend why I apologized, why I always apologize, why sorry leaps from my lips like frogs from a pond?
Well, I could tell them this:
We who hate ourselves believe we are always wrong. We believe that our every thought, word, want, and deed is incorrect, insulting, barbarous. We so believe this that we beg forgiveness not just after every thought, word, want, and deed but during and before. We do this because we want everyone to know we know how wrong we are, how bumbling and ignorant and rude. We do this because we want them to know we know they know.
We want this right away, because the sooner we show we are sorry, the more mercy we might win. If we walk right in with our heads hung low, we might be punished less. If we fall to our knees and bang our foreheads on the floor before saying a word, we beat them to the punch.
When we apologize, we are not being disingenuous. We are not backhandedly blaming others or fishing for compliments. We are not faking our remorse. That is the tragic part. It feels so real to us, that nauseous jolt of dread that starts deep in the gut and surges up through shoulders, neck, and jaw. We cannot wait. We cannot hold it in. We really, truly do feel guilty, like small children staring saucer-eyed at the spilled milk.
We say it so reflexively that, for us, sorry is a placeholder, a salutation, a reflex, a tic. To paraphrase Descartes: We apologize, therefore we exist. We are so used to saying sorry that it is our most familiar form of human contact. With apologies we introduce ourselves. Apologies are how we display admiration, respect, jealousy, and fear. Apologies are yet another of the thousand ways in which we show what we believe is love: by going belly-up and playing dead.
We who still sting from relentless criticism and punishment exacted long ago are hyperaware of all errors we have made and all errors we might have made and might still make. A specific region of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, has been found to be involved in self-monitoring, in the detection of errors and reactions to negative feedback, becoming activated and triggering negative emotions in people and lab animals who have failed to perform tasks correctly—or who have been led to believe that they failed to perform tasks correctly. Researchers even have a name for this emotional response, which can be measured electrophysiologically: error-related negativity, or ERN.
Unsurprisingly, studies show that the anterior cingulate cortex is especially active in post-traumatic stress disorder patients, survivors of child abuse, and the children of parents with mental-health problems.
Oops. Sorry.
We say sorry to ward off penalties we believe we deserve. We say sorry just as we might curl into balls, shielding our faces with our fingers, when attacked. We say sorry the same way lepers in medieval England announced their approach by ringing bells and intoning Unclean. When we say sorry, we mean: Sorry I exist. Like the Steve Martin line Well, excuuuuse me. Except for real.
We stand accused. Or so we think.
Which is to say this too translates to fear. Sorry is just another version of our mantra: Shut up, self! How easy is this etymology?
Some of us were punished relentlessly. We said sorry hoping to stave off the next scream or strike, the next almost-annihilation. We said sorry to explain ourselves to those who would not understand. We said sorry to subdue those who subsumed us. We said sorry to stall, soothe, placate, and pray. We learned to say sorry the hard way.
So now we say sorry to stifle what we really want to say. Sorry blocks out all other sounds. For us, sorry is liturgy and loyalty, hello and please, and even I love you. We say sorry compulsively for the exact same reason we say yes yes yes when we mean no. For fear of punishment. For fear of people. For fear of ourselves. It’s autophobia again: Fear of our thoughts. Our wants. Which might be weird. Or wild. Warning! Warning! Opinion on the loose!
Granted, authentic, merited apologies for misdeeds large and small, material and metaphysical, are bold spiritual acts. Expressing regret for harm done, making amends, takes courage and humility. It might not right all wrongs, but saying sorry when sorry is justified can help heal both the harmer and the harmed.
Our knee-jerk sorry-ness is almost never justified. Our pathological apologies blur the meanings of insult and offense.
We say sorry unaccountably, like the boy who cried wolf. This annoys everyone. It forces them to wonder what we are apologizing for, which makes them scan their consciences for what they might have done to inadvertently make us think they were angry or upset. They perceive our apologies as accusations, as passive-aggressive jabs: Our Sorry, Sarah, I am being boring sounds to Sarah like Sarah, you are displaying insufficient interest in me; I am hurt. Our Sorry, Josh, for choosing this expensive restaurant sounds to Josh like Josh, you are clearly unhappy here. Are you poor or just cheap?
Thus our apologies make them apologize, albeit without wanting to or knowing why, which ironically makes them angry and upset. We hang our heads. They reassure us, feeling dirty and coerced. Low self-esteem thereby destroys another day. Day after day.
So our apologies are ardent. Abject. Infinite. Degrading. Dunce-cap degradation is the point. For us, sorry does not mean Uh-oh but Should I jump off the bridge or shoot myself?
I learned early in life to scan faces and voices for signs of hurt or offense. I knew to ask, as easily as breathing: Are you mad at me?
Sometimes they said No, sometimes What? or Why? and sometimes, with a brisk air of conviction or an eager shiver, Yes.
So I said—
It becomes a ritual. Like so much else: slitting oneself straight down the front and slumping nude with entrails spilling out. Spare me. Then that vast blankness. The klieg lights. The wait. For us who hate ourselves, living is one long game of Mother May I?
How could they know, the recipients of my apologies, that I apologized to everyone? That they were not so special, albeit my begging for their mercy? Just like this, breathless and pale?
How could they know my every step was hesitant, my every word written or spoken as a test? Which I might fail. Fail. Fail, and then apologize. In doorways. On my knees.
Forgiveness is approval, but conditional. Forgiveness is whoever you think you have wronged, saying, I declare you excused. This time. Next time I might not be so nice.
For us who hate ourselves, forgiveness is always one-sided because anyone, by virtue of not being us, has earned the automatic status of correctness, thus the automatic right to our apologies. Thus they are our superiors, because everyone is.
Oliver Wendell Holmes called apology “only egotism wrong side out,” deeming it “a very desperate habit.”
Take a tip from cognitive behavioral psychology: Become aware of your urge to apologize. Each time the urge arises, do not speak. Resist. This is the hardest part, the panic-striking part. Our mea culpas are compulsive, so not blurting sorry feels like being thirsty but denied a drink.
Keep silent for ten seconds, then the next time twenty-five. Hold your apology. Observe the urge: feel it from front to back, the way doctors examine glands. What does this sorry really mean? What does it hide?
What might you say instead? Rather than say sorry, forgive yourself. This awful crime, your twentieth today: Was it really so awful, after all?
Renaissance-era saints prayed all night long on icy chapel floors clad in itchy hair shirts and barbed-wire belts. With knotted leather scourges, they whipped their own backs until they bled. Such practices were said to punish sins of the flesh while cleansing the soul. With each apology, we mortify ourselves as well, believing we are punishing our sins. But how ironically unholy: making even strangers into God, we cast ourselves upon their altars, displaying our bleeding backs, telling them, Absolve or annihilate me. It is up to you: heaven or hell.
Sorry I have made this part of the book so long. Sorry I have made this part of the book too short.
Sorry it was not funnier. Sorry it was not serious enough. Forgive its lack of references to cormorants or Vincent Price.
No, really. Please.
I want to bring home Chinese takeout, so I am standing at the counter in a restaurant. A miniature fountain ripples gently near the register. The manager uncaps his pen.
I need only two entrées. These will be prepared, then placed into boxes, which will go side by side into a bag. See how easy that sounds?
But I am panicking. As usual, I cannot choose. The menu is printed in both English and Chinese, but for all the sense it makes to me right now, it might as well be hieroglyphics.
It lists forty-six dishes, some with tiny photographs to help. And making my task ostensibly simpler is the fact that these dishes are all Chinese. Thus I need not choose between, say, tacos and borscht.
But still, my face is hot. My throat is tight. Soft music throbs over the speakers, giving my mind yet another excuse not to concentrate. The manager looks at the clock. Oh hell.
Just pick.
You goddamn wimpy indecisive dumbass. Pick!
Self-loathing cripples our ability to choose. Thinking ourselves inferior means automatically assuming that whatever we pick will be wrong. For us, facing a choice means automatically predicting our own failure. For us, choosing means not choosing the best but rather choosing the least worst. Pondering options, we feel the hot-cold flush of anticipated disappointment—This will suck!—and, if our choices impact other people, punishment. My finger trailing up and down a menu or a sales rack is the finger of defeat. For us who hate ourselves, to choose is to experience precognitive regret.
Guess what! This translates back to fear! Our fear of choice is really fear of failure. Blame. Being exposed in our inferiority, of which our choices are plain proof. What? You picked sweet-and-sour squid? Good God. Well, now we know never to let you pick again.
Faced with a choice, some of us freeze. We stand there spaced-out, stalling, shuffling our feet, as if some miracle might spare us: a typhoon, say, or a sudden law banning all foods but beef.
Faced with a choice, some of us who hate ourselves do not stall but rush headlong into wild, random, risky situations so as not to appear scared or indecisive. This mysterious white liquid I am drinking, this stranger into whose car I have just climbed, and my new Satan tattoo are miles better than nothing and/or looking like a wimp. Yet rash behavior, breakneck choices, also start from fear—of being unhip, left out, standing still.
Whether you respond to your fears with paralysis or outrageousness, your response is a coping mechanism for living in a choice-riddled world. Now more than ever, choices lurk and beckon everywhere, with literally countless options in countless arenas just a click away. What to watch, wear, hear, eat, see, learn, read, play, write, do; whom to tell what, where, how, and when: the very “choiciness” that some hail as a sign of progress is, for we the choice-challenged, a source of deep anxiety.
Some of us have trouble choosing because, too often, others chose for us—or we chose whatever another ordered, trusting them more than ourselves.
Serena Williams admits that as a child she “always tried to be Venus”—her elder sister and fellow tennis superstar, Venus Williams.
“There were two Venus Williamses in our family—it was crazy,” said the Wimbledon winner and four-time Olympic gold medalist. At restaurants, “my parents would make me order first, but once she ordered, I’d change my mind. It was tough for me to stop being Venus and become the person I am. . . . I still copy Venus in many ways, but it’s not as bad.”
Even for those who do not hate themselves, choice is a challenge. Studies show that, faced with more than six options, the human brain enters a state known as choice overload. People allowed to choose from among six varieties of candy report far more satisfaction with their choices afterward than those allowed to choose from among twelve varieties. The latter group feels more anxiety than the first group while making their selections, then more regret afterward.
Imagine feeling that overwhelmed by choice and then that regretful afterward not only in a lab experiment or a restaurant but with every gesture and every word and thought every minute of every day. That is life with low self-esteem. You probably don’t need to “imagine” it. You probably feel it right now.
If making choices is stressful for everyone, it is more so for us.
One day when I was very small, Mom called my name from her bedroom and said, Bring me a glass of water.
I was thrilled. It was the first time an adult had sought my help. I toddled briskly to the kitchen, proud to be a courier, a bringer of refreshment. Standing on a chair, I seized a glass and turned the faucet on.
But wait.
She had not said how cold or hot.
She had not said how much.
One hand under the streaming tap, I stalled. Two possible scenarios flashed back and forth: In one, I handed Mom a partly empty glass. She growled, Why so little? Were they charging by the ounce? In the other scenario, I gave her a full glass. Hefting it, she snarled, Trying to drown me?
Either was equally plausible.
Thus however much water I put in the glass could equally be wrong.
An empty glass, a full one, something in between. That was asking for trouble.
My joy became doubt, which became terror.
Wrong choices, I realized then, cause suffering. They do this by being more unpleasant than correct choices: less thirst-quenching, say, or (just ask Goldilocks) too hot. Wrong choices make us suffer by incurring mockery and anger. When our wrong choices make others suffer, we suffer as well and even more: they suffer merely because of an action, whereas we suffer watching them suffer because of an action, then we suffer doubly because that action was ours.
Which is to say, wrong choices confirm what we think of ourselves and what we think others think of us: that we are bad. That we cannot be trusted with decisions, dinner, water in a glass. That letting us decide is dangerous.
Decision making demonstrates responsibility. Decision making demonstrates maturity. Decision making demonstrates identity. And we who hate ourselves have issues with all three.
As long as we can stave off making choices, we remain untested, uncharged, and at large, leaving no mark, thus safe in at least one way from ourselves. The state of non-choice is for us a state of grace, a plateau where we breathe rarefied air because nothing is asked of us.
In our desire to avoid choices, we devise dodges and ploys. Asked to choose—or help choose—a baby’s name, a type of car, an arborist, a wine, a destination—we pretend to be polite. Oh no, we say. It’s up to YOU. As if we proved our love with deference. As if we had no preference. As if we would decide next time. As if.
What we are really doing with these pas de deux is letting others hold the bag if anything goes wrong. Whoever chooses will be held responsible for that selection and its aftermath, in perpetuity. If those results are good, hooray. If those results are bad, boohoo. If someone else selected, hey, he or she should have chosen otherwise. Hee-hee, at least it wasn’t me.
We pray: May it never be me. Sometimes (by force, when young, while drunk) we choose, then pretend we did not. My parents made me major in art history. You made me marry you. He tricked me into olive green. We pretend to be helpless victims of selections others made. Meanwhile, we wait with bated breath to be found out, for someone to point straight at us and say: You raised that Jägermeister to your lips and drank, or Who the hell wears tube socks with a skirt? or You chose this cruise! You!
We know it well, from every pear we ever ate that should have been an apple, every road not taken, every message sent in anger or mistaken haste. We who hate ourselves know so well this yearning to turn back the hands of time: Do over. Better yet, do nothing. Ever. Anything at all.
The menu swims under my gaze. The heart-shaped clock ticks, tick-tick, like a cartoon time bomb on the wall. The manager has walked away.
Wait, egg foo yong. Wait, no. My ears feel iced. What could go wrong? I like all Chinese food. In all my life, I never had a Chinese dish I did not like. Waiting at home is someone who would happily eat anything, would happily eat sweet-and-sour pencils if I ordered them.
I could pick anything. I could just close my eyes and point.
What if the chow fun is too soft? What if the egg foo yong is runny? They never were before, and I’ve eaten here for years. But. What if? Gross.
And I am thinking: Someone save me. Someone burn this motherfucker down!
I tell the manager my order, wishing I was anywhere but here, my throat almost too tight to talk. That worry like a grater to the brain.
Self-loathing renders us inactive, turns us into bugs in amber. We know that doing nothing means doing nothing wrong. Because we hate ourselves, we hate whatever we would choose. (Morgan. Maroon. Puerto Vallarta.) Then, voilà, our vacillations become something else about us we can hate.
You could never ask Mom why she had done or said any particular thing. Oh, you could ask. But she would never say. Her eyes flashed panic, then went blank as she said, I don’t know. Ask her again, impatiently or gently, and through clenched teeth like an apprehended burglar she hissed, I don’t KNOW.
Which was true. She did not. She hung her head and hid it in her hands and if you kept asking she sobbed, repeating I don’t know, her shoulders shaking helplessly. And you could ask and ask and ask but she would never answer you, because she never knew. Sometimes she would walk off and lock herself in a room. And sometimes she would raise her head as if waking from sleep and say, Look over there—a fly! or The parking is always awful at the airport.
This habit has two halves: indecision and regret. They fuel each other. Each could exist independently. That would be bad enough. But we who hate ourselves get both. Start backward. Before choosing, refuse to regret. Imagine regret as a cord you have unplugged. Thenceforth, no matter what you pick—hot or cold, red or blue, chow mein or sautéed brains—will be okay. Maybe not great, but probably not lethal. Make the most of it. Find five good things (it’s hot, it’s colorful, it’s cooked, it has no Snarol in it, and I now see cauliflower in a whole new way) about your choice, no matter what—just as you’d reassure a child who cried, I should have brought my other doll!
How many times have you felt overjoyed—then doomed? How many of your parties, victories, and private glory moments have you punctured, thinking: Does she hate me now? Do I look fat? This is the habit that is hardest to explain to those who do not hate themselves. We have fun. Then we make it stop.
We believe that whatever feels at first like joy is not. Or is, but will not last. Or should not last. We feel so sure of this that we will undermine our own inklings of joy, blunting the pain we think awaits. This way we beat pain to the punch. We will not simply sit/stand/lie like suckers when the practical joke finishes, the push, the pendulum.
We will not let ourselves be caught off-guard by joy and its evil conjoined twin, irony.
Snorkeling means shark attack. Sunshine means skin cancer. Ask us out on a date and we assume that you are taunting us plain-Janes in a cruel “dogfight” contest with your friends. Hug us and we will think you want to gauge how misshapen we are under our clothes.
Who taught us to defuse our thrills, flatten our peaks? Our spellcasters.
Earlier in this book, we met Kristy, whose father punctured her joy at completing a real-life conversation in Russian by asking whether she could have had the same conversation in Dutch. Franz Kafka experienced similar emotional stifling when his youthful joy was repeatedly mocked and dismissed by his harsh father.
“It was only necessary to be happy about something or other, to be filled with the thought of it, to come home and speak of it,” Kafka wrote in a letter to his father, “and the answer was an ironic sigh, a shaking of the head, a tapping on the table with a finger: ‘Is that all you’re so worked up about?’ . . . or ‘Where is that going to get you?’ or ‘What a song and dance about nothing!’ Of course, you couldn’t be expected to be enthusiastic about every childish triviality. . . . But that was not the point.”
And so we learned to puncture our own happiness before our spellcasters could do it to us. Doing it ourselves hurts slightly less. It’s less embarrassing for dreams to be dashed privately, in silence, than it is in public amid sneers and jibes.
And so:
Approaching my room down the poppy-colored carpet of a softly golden hallway at a luxury hotel on a June afternoon, I tell myself: Have a nice day.
No, really. Take it in. Do what a normal person booked into a luxury hotel would do: have a nice day.
My room has custard-colored walls, a gleaming desk, marble-topped nightstands, and a king-size bed whose duvet is as weightless as whipped cream. Brass-legged, satin-seated armchairs flank tall windows framing hills studded with candy-colored houses and a silver bay.
Have a nice day.
Goddamn it, have one.
For us who hate ourselves, this is harder than it sounds. Sinking onto the bed, I feel a jab of panic. A small tray of Medjool dates has been placed on a nightstand by the management, as has a linen napkin rolled up in a paper cuff. What are the chances, I wonder, that today is the day this hotel is consumed by fire? I don’t see any fire escapes. In which direction must I run when the alarm goes off?
I rise to place my overnight bag near the door so that I can seize it while fleeing, dodging the flames. I mean—if.
I tell myself that ordinary people do not think this way. I tell myself: My fellow guests are filling ice buckets and snuggling into bathrobes, savoring their views. I tell myself that all over this hotel, people are having a nice day.
We who hate ourselves find it gruelingly difficult to have fun. The very experiences that should thrill us and warm our hearts can chill us to the bone.
We cannot accept what would normally be joy because we believe we do not deserve it. Thus whatever looks like joy in our lives cannot really be joy but rather something wicked resembling it. A joke. A trick, like in the film Carrie where the title character is asked to the prom by a popular boy. She gratefully accepts his invitation, only to realize on prom night that she has been the butt of a sadistic prank. A trick, a trap. As in: Chocolate will make you fat.
And hey, one day I went to a theater to watch Kathak dancers from India. Their costumes were the colors of sunset, sherbet, and antifreeze. The dancers reached, leaped, arched. When I returned home, Mom asked, Was it fun? I said, Oh yes. She said, Good. Because while you were out enjoying yourself, Dad died.
He had. The one time I let down my guard—while watching those dancers, I had told myself: See? This is how it feels to enjoy life—fate showed me who was boss. Lesson learned. Must be vigilant.
In a scene from one of Henning Mankell’s Wallander mysteries, a villain rigs a bomb to himself that is connected to a heart monitor. He warns pursuing detectives not to upset him, because the bomb is programmed to explode—and thus kill them all—if his heart rate reaches ninety beats per minute. This is what happens to those of us who are programmed to undermine our joy: a moderate amount of fun is okay, but as soon as it rises above a certain threshold, BOOM—the irony bomb goes off and happiness is dead. And so we strive to keep delight at bay, under control, lest our joy trigger a bomb-blast of fear and dread.
Fun can be had by anyone, but kept (we think) only by those who earn it. For the rest of us, fun is a punishment, because we have that much farther to fall.
Ostensibly about to have a perfect afternoon at the hotel, I think:
You forgot extra socks, you space cadet. Whatever happens, you’re like duh, always a million miles away. Are you brain-damaged? Really. Maybe you should have an MRI. Big mirror in this room. Better avoid it. You know you look horrible. Your awful hair. Why can you never pull yourself together, even for one day? Clothes. Makeup. Hair. But no. Always the hobo. The concierge downstairs was probably about to call the cops on you before you said you had a reservation here. You look like you dress in the dark. Because you do.
Look out that window. Seagulls in the sky. Your life is going by. So is everyone else’s, but they feel alive. Not like you, Miss Invisible, Miss 65 Percent.
Someone is knocking on the door. Maybe it is a manager, here to say that I don’t get to stay at the hotel anymore, that I have been kicked out. But no, it is a bellman, bearing a complimentary bottle of sparkling water.
And thus my would-be perfect afternoon begins.
I take a bath.
I silently stare out the window for an hour.
I tell myself: You will not get this time back after it is gone. It is brief but it is yours to enjoy. I tell myself: This hotel has lasted over a hundred years without a fire. You are no monster. You will not be moved. You will not be a laughingstock. You look okay. No bad news will arrive today. You will simply pass through this place as does everyone else, feeling your footsteps on the golden carpet and, outside, hearing the cable cars’ clack clack. None of the thousand awful things you fear will happen in the next twenty-four hours. Behold. You see. You breathe. You are ensconced in luxury. What fun.
And when the night melts into morning, when two hundred fifty thousand lamps glow softly throughout the city at dawn, when in the restaurant I say: Thank you for these pancakes and How beautiful, how difficult this is. How familiarly difficult. And so I say: I will not suffer this way anymore.
I say: Have a nice day.
No, seriously. Starting now.
In diaries when I was young, I always placed quotation marks around the pronoun I. It isn’t funny anymore. We who hate ourselves tend not to feel real. Many of us enact our daily routines feeling like impostors. Some feel virtually nonexistent. By contrast, ordinary people, those with self-esteem, feel real. It is a given, they would say, a birthright. They’re born, then feel real. Why don’t “I”? “I” don’t know. This is about not being quite alive, about existing in the world with no idea how existence is actually done.
Around people, I do and say whatever I think it will take to be liked. This is bizarre, because I am a solitary type. I should not, at some level do not, care what others think of me. Yet I go through the motions of caring obsessively what others think of me, because I was trained in this by someone who cared obsessively what others thought of her, and what they thought of me. With people—not all, but most—I lock into autopilot, into fake-out mode, needing to be the funny one, the one to whom they say, I like you best.
In fake-out mode, I talk a million miles an hour, jabbering and pointing, peering into eyes and gesturing at passing landscapes like some hybrid hostess-priest-professor-jester-ringmaster-analyst-traveloguist-soulmate-savior-seer-sage-connoisseur-confessor-skald.
I hate myself when I do this, yet cannot stop.
I tell myself it is less rude than staring silently out windows until the required time has passed. Am I polite? Or just afraid to appear sullen and ungrateful? I could leave. But hey, that would be honesty.
And hey, I aim to please.
How are you doing? I ask. Nice shirt. Ha-ha-ha, that cloud is shaped like an erection. Is your sister better? Look, a Maserati! Whoa, a baobab! Is your burger too rare? So tell me about law school! Arthritis! Berlin!
Each time I tell myself: Do not do it again. Then I do it again.
It happens automatically, involuntarily, like demonic possession or insulin shock.
Preparing to see others—as I dress, as I go out—I mouth an incantation: Do not fake it, do not fake it—
Do not call attention to yourself with silly gestures. Do not believe that the joy of everyone in your proximity depends on you. Do not fear that one of them might be bored, in pain, or yearning for a list of famous local architects that you must volubly supply. Do not disgorge personal data to invoke an aura of mutual trust. Do not ask anyone their dearest wish or what they would like their last meal to be. Do not try too hard. Do not riff.
I riff.
I hate this. Riffing is another form of begging, this time begging everyone to like me, like me, like me, whether or not I like them or want to be there. Check out that soprano. (Do you like me?) Six more miles to Devil Mountain. (Do you like me?) Who cuts your hair? (Please, please, please like me.)
Do not riff. But you might just as well shout instructions to a drowning man.
I tell myself: Just be yourself.
Ha-ha.
The “me” in social situations is not flat-out acting but rather versions of me as if projected through some kind of frightening machine. It is a fractionary me, a synthetic me. It is me portraying me. It is me covering for me.
Which is to say: I lie.
I have lied about love. I have done so and afterward felt faintly ill but could not discern why. It was because self-loathing can make us too self-obsessed for love, because it really is hard to love others when you cannot love yourself. You try. You care. You try to care. You cross a room to ask how others are. You try to care, but sometimes you cannot. Hence, fake-out mode. This is a chilly illness, such as one might feel upon waking to realize that, while drunk or sleepwalking, one has joined a sadistic motorcycle gang.
The lies of us who hate ourselves clatter in our heads like mah-jongg tiles. This is the sound of not realizing that you are still waiting for your life to start. And so we scramble to appear that we know what to do.
“We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Here I go talking fancifully perhaps to skirt the issue, which is that Mom never felt real and neither have I. No one ever taught me to feel real, although you could argue that this is something one need never be taught, that even animals feel real. Perhaps I felt real upon being born. Perhaps, but then—as seen in photographs—a point arrived at which my eyes appeared to die.
To feel real was to disobey her and betray her.
What strange lessons in a strange academy. Now what? Just like Pinocchio, I long to turn from wood to flesh. Some say I am real now. Should I believe them?
We who hate ourselves are ashamed to admit our sense of unreality, ashamed to ask for help, because we’ve asked before and have believed—really believed for hours at a time—that we were real. We told ourselves we must be real because, look, we have hands and hair and what passes for friends. We laugh at jokes. We eat. We must be real. We are ashamed to be bottomless pits of need and to admit feeling unreal because to admit this means admitting we have told a lie, a huge hurtful enormous lie that will make others sad or mad. To wit: I faked you out. I was only pretending to be real.
Many of us who hate ourselves experience our presence in the world as what psychologists call a “false self”—that is, a constructed persona that concerns itself almost solely with public image, yet is cut off from the “true self,” as the person feels hollow, unreal, or dead inside. False selves are not created consciously as deliberate attempts to fake out the public. They are not like disguises used by con artists or fugitives in order to harm others and avoid arrest.
First named and discussed by the mid-twentieth-century British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, false selves are formed unconsciously as defense mechanisms to protect the “true self,” the authentic, creative, playful, spontaneous self that has been traumatized—by abuse, neglect, deprivation, and/or enforced compliance—and in order to save itself has gone into hiding, where it remains elusive, inaccessible, or even unknown to the individual him- or herself, who goes through life feeling empty inside or dead inside and fake outside, without knowing why.
False selves often emerge when small children receive no “mirroring” from adult caregivers whose love and attention is inconsistent and/or conditional, given only when the child obeys and studiedly imitates the dominant caregiver in every way possible, becoming in effect a miniature version of that adult without understanding that this is happening, or why.
The false self means well. It is, after all, a survival strategy, and functions as a kind of caretaker or guard, allowing us to function with at least apparent normalcy while protecting the true self from what Winnicott called “annihilation.” Thus the false self presents a “polite and mannered” if also rigid and defensive mien. Especially in intellectual types, the false self “very easily deceives,” Winnicott wrote:
“The world may observe academic success of a high degree, and may find it hard to believe in the very real distress of the individual concerned, who feels ‘phoney’ the more he or she is successful.”
In extreme cases, the individual is unaware of having both a true self and a false self. “The False Self sets up as real” and is taken by observers, and the individuals themselves, to be an authentic personality. Presented with “situations in which what is expected is a whole person”—such as friendship or love—it becomes apparent that “the False Self, however well set up, lacks something, and that something is the essential central element of creative originality,” Winnicott observed.
Healing begins when the true self is “acknowledged as a potential and is allowed a secret life,” which becomes less and less secret in time. If I come to realize that this jabbering, gesturing figure that presents itself to others while I feel dead inside is a false self, that this false self remains at the helm oversharing, talking too fast, and trying too hard to please while down there somewhere unseen and even unfelt by me is a true self, a long-lost and mysterious true self, then I can first of all forgive the fact of this false self. I did not forge a false self willingly, deceitfully, or even consciously. These things it does are not my fault. I do not want it to exist. It serves a purpose that I wish did not exist.
This false self that I present to society is useful to me—because at some level I fear that if everyone saw what I’m like on the inside while faking it on the outside, many people would dislike me. But so what? Is it my job to be adored by everyone? I am a solitary type. One of the main causes of my self-loathing was a childhood spent denying this essential fact. Living in fake-out mode just furthers that denial. Talk about unreal. This false self is a handy little coping mechanism that allows us to function in situations that otherwise we would find intolerable. Is that such a heavy price to pay, a dash of fraudulence, if—at least for a while—it helps us face the world?
But which self is writing this book?
Ever since I first became conscious of doing things, it has been a sick sort of consciousness, the strange nebulous state of being hyperconscious yet also unconscious, hypnotized, robotic, automatic, lacking agency. All my life I have been hyperaware of far too much, of everyone’s opinions of me, of their possible reactions, of their feelings and desires and the risk of their despising me and the fact that this does not matter, yet it does. Meanwhile, I have been half-switched off, numb in a way, or half-asleep, on autopilot, marking time. I’m doing it right now, writing in what I think is perfect rhythm because I am terrified that if I let this rhythm drop for just a beat my words will lose your interest, you will judge me as inferior, your eyes will glaze over, and you will drift away. And then?
I will cease to exist.
Our true selves, the selves from our “times before,” are waiting for us. Where to find them? In the places and activities that make us hate ourselves the least. Do you hate yourself less than usual while mountain-climbing, singing, studying, discussing lab results, visiting France? Wherever you hate yourself less is where your true self lives, where he or she feels safe to work and play.
Seek your true self the way birdwatchers scan the sky and trees. The more you come to recognize your true self—as it smiles into a forest campfire, say, or shines while fine-tuning a car—accept him or her. Welcome, embrace, and protect your true self as you would your best pal or your child. See, that’s the deal. Some of our true selves’ traits might be uncommon or unpopular, but once we grasp that they are ours and real, we must wear them with pride and joy as if our lives depended on it, because they do. Don’t hate your true self just because self-hatred is a habit. My true self craves silence, abhors cities, adores holiday décor (not holidays, but their décor), is childish by most estimations, and would rather be alone on a deserted beach than with just about anyone or doing just about anything else. It took me over forty years to realize these essential, life-defining truths.
The first step toward no longer faking it is to stop despising ourselves for faking it. Fakery is perfectly understandable, and it’s something most people do, consciously or not. Fake it till you make it, they say, and in our case making it entails first locating that elusive true self. With enough encouragement, the true self will be ready to emerge. But until then, someone has to be at the controls, and a false self is better than no self at all.
Thus the second step toward no longer faking it is to realize that faking it will likely be our last self-loathing quirk. After the rest are unlearned and let go, when the time for the real me has finally arrived, it will be the false me, the last tenant in my self-esteem halfway house, who will hand over the keys to the real me.
It’s not the false me’s fault. She meant to help.
This is the place to start.
False self, meet true self. Hello. Hi. Acknowledge both. And like long-separated siblings bound to save each other, each has done its best.
My friend Tessa always avoided certain buildings and even entire streets in our town—devising circuitous, time-consuming detours around them—because, she said, they bring up bad memories. Asked to describe these memories, Tessa narrated incidents that most would dismiss as insignificant. She had once felt embarrassed during a job interview in that office building. Boys had once jeered at her from that frat house. In that bakery, a clerk had mocked her accent—one day, many years before. I told Tessa that she was making herself her own outcast, walling off parts of her own town to herself based on ever-more-distant memories. She scoffed. Those wounds were ever-fresh.
Sages advise us to live in the present moment. “Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself,” proclaimed the guru Paramahansa Yogananda. “Forget the past, for it is gone.” Buddhist visionary Thich Nhat Hanh suggests beginning each meditation session—and alerting ourselves throughout each day—with the mantra “Present moment, wonderful moment.”
Well, yeah. But we who hate ourselves are glued to the past, because the past is for us a place of both enchanting wonder and hypnotic horror. In the past lie our “times before,” those magic days when we did not yet hate ourselves. And in the past lies every failure, every dumb thing we have ever done. For us, the past is fairyland and prosecution files, escape and evidence. For us, the past is loaded. The rearview mirror is irresistible.
The past consumes me. It should not. It should not consume anyone. It is gone. It is over. This is one of the few facts we know for sure in an uncertain world: The past is gone. We can’t go back and fix or change it or relive it. We can’t. Yet, even knowing this, we stare and stare and stare through that rearview mirror down that ever-receding highway.
Eckhart Tolle asserts that the past is an illusion.
“What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. . . . Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is ‘borrowed’ from the Now.”
Tolle warns against becoming “trapped in time,” against having “the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,” which “creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be.” The past, Tolle writes, “is an illusion,” a delusion, and even a “mental disease” that cuts us off from our true selves, which exist only and forever in the Now.
While we gaze into the past, wishing it had been different, the present whizzes by unnoticed. I will eventually see this present, but only after it appears in the rearview mirror, after it has become the past, after it’s too late to change, after it’s too late to experience whatever happens as it happens.
People who don’t hate themselves and who gaze through the front windshield see dangers and changes as they loom, and prepare for them accordingly. But we who hate ourselves and are thus riveted to our rearview mirrors are often unprepared for what’s coming down life’s pike.
As we gaze into our rearview mirrors, everyone else sees a rainbow up ahead. By the time this rainbow would have appeared in our rearview mirrors, it has faded away. And so it happens again. And again.
A lifetime spent looking out the rearview mirror is a lifetime missed. A lifetime experienced only in retrospect. A lifetime of regret.
Tearing our eyes off the receding horizon might be the hardest thing we’ll ever do, because the past is known. The past is proof. The past is what we use to justify our misery. But look! Another rainbow’s just around the bend. Can you afford to miss it?
She said, You saved my day. I said, No way.
He said, You look nice in that dress. I thought: What does he want?
They said, We love your latest book. Cringing, I thought of my previous book, the one that failed.
I cannot accept praise.
Praise is a gift. Intangible, but just as precious and as meant as any wrapped box or bouquet. Even the latter are hard for us who hate ourselves to accept, so sure are we that we do not deserve them. Given presents, Mom would stash them in closets or under beds for as long as possible. Forced to unwrap one, she slashed wildly at its paper, tape, or string, starting to cry. Pulling its contents free, she turned the gift around in her hands and made choking sounds.
Praise is a harder kind of present to deflect. It cannot be stashed or left wrapped. Praise is immediate and as such demands an immediate response.
But we never believe it, so what can we say?
Thanks would be obvious. But we are so appalled by praise, so bent on informing its giver of his or her ignorance, that we fall over ourselves mumbling But no, you are mistaken, waving our hands as if ducking gnats.
Our praisers stare in wonderment. We might as well set fire to ribboned boxes and bright bouquets as their givers watch, in shock.
Praise reaches its recipient in stages. First one hears or sees kind words. This might be a surprise. The kind words take two seconds to sink in, a sweet private absorption, like honey on toast. Then, for those who do not hate themselves, comes belief.
For us who do hate ourselves, the process stops at its first step. We hear. We see. Surprise! But then nothing sinks in. Those words might as well be honey on tin.
We tell ourselves we are just being honest. Modest. Realistic. Fair. Watching others accept praise we think they do not deserve, we vow to never be like them. Beaming and cavalier, they ask, Oh, do you REALLY like my hair? so they can hear the same praise twice. What narcissists they are!
We know: whomever praises us must be delirious. In time they will want to retract their words. Once they see the real me. Save them the pain. Say: Sure, but what you do not know is that I laugh at funerals and cheated on my driving test.
Those whose praise we deflect—often without even a thanks—are often irked or hurt. They do not understand that our demurrals and denials are not rude but, to us, absolutely true.
Our flaws, our (at best) mediocrity, the wages of birth, age, and random chance upon us are so obviously irrefutable to us that even tiny compliments bounce off us like Ping-Pong balls.
Having begun his illustrious career in the late 1960s, Robert Crumb is the most popular underground comic artist who ever lived. His legendary status was already well-established—in fact, a full-length biographical film about him, Crumb, was soon to premiere nationwide—when Crumb launched the first volume in his Self-Loathing Comics series. Its cover sports a grotesque self-portrait in which a bug-eyed, wrinkly-faced, bucktoothed Crumb stares in horror at his reflection in a mirror. IS THAT ME?! he asks, then answers his own question: MY GOD! IT IS!!
Whatever was written in those sheaves of fan letters he had received over the previous twenty-five years clearly wasn’t having any effect right then.
And really, what praise could penetrate the self-loathing resolve of Lenny, the main character of Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story, who describes himself thusly:
“A slight man with a gray, sunken battleship of a face, curious wet eyes, a giant gleaming forehead on which a dozen cavemen could have painted something nice, a sickle of a nose perched atop a tiny puckered mouth, and from the back, a growing bald spot whose shape perfectly replicates the great state of Ohio, with its capital city, Columbus, marked by a deep-brown mole. Slight. Slightness is my curse in every sense. A so-so body in a world where only an incredible one will do. A body at the chronological age of thirty-nine already racked with too much LDL cholesterol, too much ACTH hormone, too much of everything that dooms the heart, sunders the liver, explodes all hope.”
Good luck praising him.
Some of our spellcasters berated us for what they said was showing off. Maybe we liked our toy guitar too much. Maybe we corrected their spelling. Who do you think you are? they raged. Then they told us who they thought we were.
Our praisers do not understand that some of us were punished for knowing our talents, punished for knowing ourselves.
Praise faintly sickens us, because we half-suspect it is the first part of practical jokes. We are on Candid Camera, hesitating to accept a compliment, then finally beaming Who? Me? At which point a screen unfurls for the lens, inscribed with all our flaws. Praise cannot be real, must be rigged. That bouquet is made of plutonium.
In other words, praise frightens us. We cannot bear the notion—which amounts to revolution—of accepting that it might be even just a little true. Just as most creatures avoid what scares them, we avoid praise—not just getting but also giving it. Some of us steer clear of its entire etiquette, not praising others because (we realize subconsciously) they might (obligatorily or grudgingly or jokingly, we think) return the favor, thus trigger our fear. But just as kids who are afraid of dogs can grow used to them one pat at a time, we can ease into praise by giving some. Throughout your day, find sincere ways of complimenting others—anything from favoriting a tweet to asking a stranger where he bought his tie. (And yes, now and then compliment yourself.) In this way, praise becomes a current we can feel flowing in both directions. Praise becomes a language we can learn.
Praise is a strange gift in that it is meant not to increase our wealth but instead simply to expose wealth we did not know we already have. Praise is a light suddenly revealing your attic full of ingots, with a chorus singing Now you know.
Say thank you! Now you know.
We are the ones who go over every school assignment, every presentation, every application, every creation and interaction again and again before and afterward with fine-toothed combs, staying up nights to tweak, re-tweak, rehearse, retool, and overcompensate. We feel so deeply flawed that even the tiniest error will annihilate us.
“The least little blemish drew tears from my eyes,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote, remembering his schoolboy self. “When I merited, or seemed to the teacher to merit, a rebuke, it was unbearable for me. . . . I did not so much mind the punishment, as the fact that it was considered my desert. I wept piteously.”
Some of us believe that others are constantly evaluating us critically. And some of us are our own harshest critics. Either way, we can’t tolerate the prospect of failure.
Even if we aim low (because we assume that if we aim high, we cannot win), even if we hate ourselves and believe ourselves to be hugely incompetent in many ways, each of us probably cherishes a few fields—even just one—in which we believe we excel. We’ve all heard—and most of us have said—sentences that begin with the words “The only thing I’m good at is . . .” And it is only through excelling in these fields that we think we can gain the sparse approval and rewards without which we would virtually cease to exist.
Because these fields are so rare and few and because we think our competence in them must compensate for our otherwise near-total incompetence, we hold them immensely precious and guard them jealously. Highly sensitive in general, we are hypersensitive when it comes to these fields and our status and achievements therein—because we falsely believe that they are all we have. Failure in our special fields, we feel, is not merely failure but a freefall plunge toward the abyss.
The hard worker, the devoted parent or partner, the fervent student, the model citizen—everyone admires these. Yet what makes them so good at what they do? Are they authentically impassioned, genuinely skilled? Or do some of them hate themselves and what looks like passion is calculated overcompensation?
For perfectionists, “just being me” is not enough. If we do better, we just raise the bar again. If we fail to better our best, we feel that we have failed. Rising up to, but not beyond, some standard level of competence is not enough to stave off the terrifying specter of mediocrity. So we must excel, striving to beat the pants off not merely everyone else but also ourselves.
Thirty-year-old microbiologist Leo was an undergrad at a small suburban college when his classmate Regina won a prestigious scholarship to Oxford University.
“But because she didn’t win the Chancellor’s Medal for the top performance in her undergraduate class, Regina was livid, lamenting how inadequate she was to have finished second. In an ironic twist, the student who did win the Chancellor’s Medal was denied entry to Oxford, yet Regina stuck tenaciously to her tenor of self-rebuke. It was as if her existence was irreparably destroyed by not having won this medal, and no words of consolation or sturdy logic could displace her self-criticism.”
Leo knew enough about Regina to understand why she was reacting this way.
“For all of her young life, she had been subject to the harsh criticisms of her demanding parents. She was simply reinflicting wounds which were conditioned in those formative years.”
Having set her own bar almost impossibly high, Regina gave herself scant option but to “fail.” Pursuing stratospheric, perfectionistic ideals sets us up for almost certain “failure,” which does not merely disappoint us but festers in our minds as proof of our inferiority, which validates further self-loathing and prevents us from savoring whatever success we do achieve. But this looks like ingratitude. Regina was too fixated on not winning the Chancellor’s Medal to appreciate having won a full scholarship to Oxford. Her classmates who had won neither medals nor scholarships seethed with envy and resentment as Regina vented about this “humiliating failure,” Leo says.
Mariel Hemingway watched her parents engage in nightly alcohol-fueled battles that ended with them hurling bottles at each other. Mariel often wiped up the blood. Subsequently she watched one elder sister go “legitimately crazy” after hard drug use and another, the supermodel Margaux Hemingway, die of an overdose. That was her family’s seventh suicide. Mariel retains what she calls “a visceral memory” of her father sexually abusing both of her sisters.
The public saw Hemingway as a slender movie star with perfect skin. They saw none of her private chaos: she too considered suicide.
“The truth was that I was fighting every day to project this illusion of perfection,” Hemingway confessed. “Like so many women, I battled with the demons of low self-esteem, what I think of as a potentially addictive personality, and a compulsive need to please others.” For years, at the peak of her career, terrified of illness, obesity, and intimacy, “I tried to literally ‘starve’ my demons—running to the point of exhaustion, eating as little food as I could.”
Researchers divide perfectionism into two types: adaptive perfectionism manifests as high personal standards driving an individual toward ostensible excellence, and maladaptive perfectionism manifests as obsession with mistakes and other people’s opinions.
Both types evince a desperate desire for control, approval, and rewards.
And both types intermingle—most demonstrably, as studies show, when it comes to body image. Hundreds of studies link perfectionism to eating disorders. A 2013 Australian study found that, among a thousand women of all sizes between ages twenty-eight and forty, those women who desired the slimmest bodies tended to also be the most plagued with self-doubt and the most concerned about making mistakes. While a certain amount of perfectionism can be an effective motivator, the authors of this study concluded that “there comes a point at which it becomes an unhelpful and vicious cycle.”
Another recent study showed that perfectionism triggers extreme behaviors that can cause serious physical, emotional, and mental problems. Examining a large group of college students, the study found that the perfectionists among them tended to overschedule activities, focus intently on caloric intake, and aim not just for good grades but to earn the highest grades in their classes. Falling short of their aims in any way led to feelings of emptiness and self-loathing.
“As perfectionists go about their day-to-day lives, they generate a lot of friction,” noted the lead author of this study. “Because of their inflexibility and unrealistic expectations, they also create problems in their relationships.” Perfectionism, he concluded, “is a double-edged personality trait”: useful in principle, but in practice sometimes disastrous.
We who hate ourselves often hold ourselves to sky-high standards, not because we think we’re superior to everyone but because we believe we’re worse than everyone else, and the only way to fend off that familiar old specter is to outperform the whole world. In any situation—were we rich, poor, A students, C students, ugly, beautiful—we would find ways to be hard on ourselves, to demand more, to ridicule ourselves for “failure,” to skewer ourselves for things done or said or things not done or said. This is just what we do.
It is perfectionism that compels us to compare ourselves to others—and to almost always come up short.
They did not ask for this, these others to whom we compare ourselves. Most of them are totally unaware that we are watching their every move in order to pit ourselves silently against them and use them—their looks, status, financial solvency, relationships—as weapons with which to batter ourselves. That we use their success as proof that we have failed.
Some of us were taught at an early age to compare ourselves to others—by others who compared themselves to others, and locked us into this endless race. Strangers sitting beside us on buses will never know how hideous, boring, or poorly dressed they make us feel.
Wendy is a forty-four-year-old fashion designer whose parents, both immigrant scientists, wanted the best for their American-born children.
“My parents were successful people whose lives were destroyed by low self-esteem,” says Wendy, who keenly remembers “my parents’ desire for us kids to be successful in the obvious Asian parents’ way: academically.” As the family’s least academically motivated child, choosing art school rather than the medical and legal degrees her siblings pursued, “I discounted myself badly,” Wendy says.
“I view self-esteem as our personal reaction to how we compare ourselves to others for what we think they do or have. Perhaps I have that concept all wrong. But how could you feel you were losing if you didn’t think others were winning or at least holding steady when you thought you weren’t? How could you think you were stupid, poor, unlucky, ugly, etc., if you didn’t perceive others as smart, wealthy, lucky, and attractive and yourself as not? Isn’t there no yin without yang?
“Over the years, perceiving myself as a loser, I allowed myself to get abused both socially and at work, both emotionally and financially. I provided friendship and support to people who didn’t deserve it. I fell prey to believing stupid crap that other people fed me. I would ignore my own gut feelings when I knew that, if I trusted myself and acted on those feelings, others would judge me harshly,” Wendy remembers.
“I spent many years being abused, broke, and depressed. It was only when I found myself giving pep talks to friends suffering from low self-esteem that I found myself examining my own. My big strategy was realizing that there was always someone worse off than myself. Very grade-school, you might say”—and a reverse form of competitiveness.
“But it worked. I compared myself to others who were perceived to be losers and to others who were perceived to be winners and realized that we are all a lot more alike than we think.”
We who hate ourselves tend to think in terms of either/or. Each thing is either good or bad, less or more, smart or dumb. Somehow, we were convinced the world has just two colors: black and white.
Stefan, a twenty-nine-year-old historian, was proud to have been accepted into a PhD program halfway around the world from his home country. But on the first day of his first seminar at his new school, anxiety swamped him. Watching each of his classmates standing up to introduce themselves and discuss their academic goals, Stefan thought they all sounded a lot smarter than he was—not to mention their excellent language skills.
“My chest was heavy with trepidation. It was almost as if there was a Sisyphean boulder weighing me down while my stomach erupted in sharp, explosive bursts of nervous energy,” Stefan remembers. “I tried to calm myself while I waited my turn, mentally rehearsing my introduction. The lines had to be perfect, and the words could not be incongruous with the context, because my sense of perfection was now highly elevated. I was on alert—against my flawed self, perched like a sniper, ready to mow down my weaknesses.”
As each classmate spoke, Stefan felt ever more blinded by “the looming shadow of inadequacy,” a shadow that had hindered his social interactions through all of his school years and made him feel like “a man enclosed.”
This too we are taught, usually by the insecure, who cannot see themselves except as fun-house-mirror images of others.
But comparisons are only thoughts—and almost entirely subjective thoughts at that.
“The thought ‘I have failed’ is a lie. ‘I am a failure’ is an even greater lie,” says Eckhart Tolle. “You have not failed. You can simply reinterpret what happened and say, ‘I have learned something.’ . . . Why believe the lies that your mind produces?”
Mom used to say my two best friends envied my drawing skills. They’d kill to draw that well, she said. Then again, my two best friends were super-smart. Mom always asked about not only my test scores but theirs: THEY got a 94 and 99? Why the hell did you get a measly 86? Drawing skills. Test scores. Competition can be healthy. Being good at things has benefits. Aspiring to improve is challenging and sometimes fun. We just need now and then to remind ourselves that no one is perfect, and to ponder what drives our desire to excel at this or that: a richer life—or desperation to meet impossible standards whose bar we will raise and raise?
Mom asked about my test scores. Ten years later, I compulsively beat my head against a tabletop because my boyfriend could read Latin, play piano, repair machines, run a business, and comprehend trigonometry, while I could not. Startled, he asked, Is this a contest? Does one of us always have to win?
No. One of us does not.
We say yes. Yes yes yes. It is a reflex.
Psychologists call this quality suggestibility.
As a child, I did what I was told because my parents were authoritarian, so nay-saying them made me fear that they might yell. Not that they ever asked me to do anything dangerous or perverse. They never said Slaughter this monkey or Jump off the roof. It was only ever a difference between slightly more pleasant and slightly less. But I had to say yes. I was physically capable of saying no, of forming that word with my mouth, but nothing ever came of that except sardonic laughter, penalties, and threats. What? You don’t want any boiled beef tongue? Ha-ha. Eat the fucking tongue. We are the parents, they said, and you are the child.
It became clear to me that this was true—and indisputable. The difference between saying yes and no was not the difference between right and wrong but between enraging someone or not. And as we all learned long ago, it’s best not to enrage them.
In a letter to his disciplinarian father, Kafka wrote: “For me as a child, everything you called out to me was positively a heavenly commandment, I never forgot it, it remained for me the most important means of forming a judgment . . . and there you failed entirely.”
Again, they meant no harm. They grew up in a bygone time when children were not asked but told. Was I born nondefiant, naturally passive, genetically likely to agree? Studies show that two out of every three babies are born strong-willed. The third is born compliant. That was me.
Sometimes I see a parent pleading with a child—whimpering: Drink your milk or Stop kicking Elise or Sweetie, darling, do Daddy a huge favor and get into the car. And the child retorts NO. When I see this, I clench inside and feel a little sick. A surge of envy—then I want to scream: Do what the grown-up says, you little brat! Then I try not to cry. And this is one more reason I never had children, because I would never want to say such things to them.
Because such statements stick. One study explored the divergent effects on two-year-olds of immediate, short, firm reprimands of the Do it because I goddamn say so type and delayed, long, gentle reprimands delivered after the fact. Toddlers exposed to short, sharp, instant reprimands “transgressed significantly less often” than did toddlers exposed to long, gentle, delayed reprimands. In other words, barking at babies turns them into Goody Two-shoes who always say yes. The study also found that the toddlers exposed to short, sharp, instant reprimands displayed markedly more “negative affect”—sorrow, fear, anxiety—than did the toddlers who were scolded latterly and softly. It’s a double-edged sword. Shouting short, sharp reprimands at children who are hurting kittens is (science says) the best way to make them stop. But shouting short, sharp reprimands at children simply because you are drunk, lazy, or overwhelmed might turn them into fearful zombies.
Verbal blandishments need not be accompanied by corporal punishment to leave scars. As the chess grandmaster Aron Nimzowitsch insightfully noted, “The threat is stronger than the execution.” Verbal and emotional abuse can turn saying no into a terrifying prospect. To say yes is to surrender. And surrender sometimes feels like safety. This was the first lesson some of us ever learned:
“The conviction that parents are always right . . . is so deeply rooted in human beings because it is based on the process of internalization that takes place during the first months of life,” writes the psychoanalyst and child-abuse expert Alice Miller.
I could not, did not, and stopped wanting to say no.
Yes comes in many forms. When Mom asked me to report my every thought and deed to her as she sat on the edge of my bed every night, I narrated the events of my days as you might reproduce a TV episode, voices and all, so that she could interpret, counsel, teach, tell me exactly what to do and say the next day, what was permitted and what was not.
In other words, I must confess. This too was saying yes. We had a fire drill. Karen made fun of my shoes. Mom asked, Do you like any boys at school? Did you make a BM?
To keep a secret is another way of saying no. When you cannot say no, your life is not your own. When you cannot say no, when in your heart of hearts you believe you cannot, then all your gates are open. Anything can happen to you. Anything can come and go. Not in a good way, because you cannot say no.
You think you have no choice. You are like Gulliver, staked to the ground by Lilliputians.
When you cannot say no, everyone is your parent, your authority, your deity.
When you cannot say no, you are a child to everyone, a slave, a supplicant, a stooge.
Others ask us: Will you give me the answers to the test? Will you loan me ten bucks? Will you stay late at work so I can go to the game? Will you hide this for me until the coast is clear? Will you stop being a tease and prove that you love me? Will you let me move in with you? Will you hold this, do that, buy this, sign that, go there, give me, let me?
In a sense, it is saintly to say yes. One who never says no could in some lights be hailed as kind, helpful, responsible, adventurous, he or she who is always there for others, he or she who can be counted on, he or she who is up for anything. Does it count if he or she says yes, but never by choice?
When you cannot say no, you sometimes wish you could. You feel guilty for wishing this, for picturing yourself hollering No no NO or swiveling your head sweetly from side to side. These images make you feel sick, so you say yes. Again. Which makes you hate yourself.
But everything becomes performative, a ploy to please. When you cannot say no, your destiny is not your own to choose.
But who would admit this?
Who would admit: I gave my life away when I learned to say yes yes, always yes. Who would admit: My life is not mine, and what have I done to get it back? Well, clearly not enough. Who would admit: I have pretended all along that I was capable of saying either yes or no, that it was always up to me, that every time I said yes I said yes (twice more just now, both voluntarily, I swear) because I wanted to.
As years went by, I thought sometimes that my life was becoming mine. I really did. I formulated symbols that it was. Yet I said yes. This was the giveaway. My life was never mine. Proven by saying yes. And yes and yes. And yes yes yes yes yes yes not in a good way. Not in a sexy Molly Bloom way. Not yes meaning yes. Yes meaning no.
I say yes because I live in terror of the next disapproval, the next doom which denies my right to exist. If I say no—
But no. So I say yes.
And thus I make myself a prisoner.
A former classmate asked for my help on a project she was planning, a website for which I would be paid a small amount to write about topics that did not interest me. She asked me in an e-mail. I replied immediately: yes. That night she called, explaining in more detail. Now it sounded even worse: being paid tiny amounts for long write-ups on topics that meant nothing to me. My voice brimmed with enthusiasm. I said yes.
But why? I could not help myself. I could not stop. My mouth kept running and my mind was perilously blank. Why was I doing this? I wanted no involvement with this project, nor had anything to lose by saying no. I did not fear this former classmate. But I blurted yes as if I did. As if she was some brutal savage stomping madly, breathing fire.
My back went stiff. It knew. My body said no, but my mouth said yes yes yes.
She thanked me. I felt as if I had been run over by a train. We hung up. Then what always happens happened: I sat striving to convince myself that it was all okay, that I had done a brilliant thing, that saying yes was smart. That the new project would be fun and interesting, that I would learn a lot, that I was honored to have been asked—yay, she likes me and she needs me, plus (as we who hate ourselves say all the time) I have nothing better to do. Meanwhile, my body said: You stupid fucking dolt. My legs were jittering just as they always do after bad news.
But now—too late! How could I call her back? What could I say? I changed my mind? Or I never meant yes? A lie. Only a lie would work. So I called her and said:
Something has come up. Yeah, in the last ten minutes. Yeah.
Because the truth? No way. No way. Nor simply Now it’s no. Because if in some paroxysm I decline, I must say why. I must confess, even if—as is fair with non-relations—my confession is a lie.
All of this means the same damned thing. We say yes when we mean no, say yes as if hypnotized, say yes the same way North Korean tour guides say of course those shops are full of food. We cannot refuse requests for the same reason we apologize, and lie: Because we are afraid of what will happen if we refuse. Because we have no boundaries. Because we are afraid they’ll never play with us again. Because we are afraid.
Exception to the rule: I can say no on one condition—when no will deny me something nice that yes would win. One day when I was twenty-three, someone with power offered me a job—the very job, for the exact same magazine—that I had wanted since I was sixteen. It would have meant traveling every month, meeting celebrities, and writing about style. Without a moment’s hesitation, I said no.
So no means yes. And yes means no.
But we can learn to make no mean no with self-respect and compassion and diplomacy. We can learn to say Not right now or Not this time or I’m unable to or I’m sorry, but no. We need not explain further in this brave new world.
Each of us is a doorway. Yes is open. No is shut. This door presently has no lock. It simply swings open and mainly stays that way, letting whomever and whatever in and out. What if you hired a locksmith and he handed you the key?
“I’ve gone through stages where I hate my body so much that I won’t even wear shorts and a bra in my house,” said the singer Fiona Apple, “because if I pass a mirror” wearing such a skimpy outfit, “that’s the end of my day.”
I know what she means. I haven’t looked into a mirror in four days.
That is, except the castanet-size one in which I apply makeup every morning. It’s so little that I can only see one small portion of my face at a time, thankfully. Besides that, I never look.
Yes, it is possible in our image-obsessed society to avoid looking at oneself. No, I am neither blind nor a saint who shuns worldly attachments nor an animist who believes that my mirror image is another me.
My gym has mirrored walls. My fellow members watch themselves work out, bright tattoos rippling like cartoons. But if I keep my eyes down, I see only drains and carpet and machines whose buffed-steel bars blur everything.
I walk daily for miles, past countless car windows and storefronts and other reflective surfaces without a glance. Call it a skill I’ve learned. Call it a sickness. Passing something shiny, I avert my eyes. I look away from polished surfaces, including sliding doors and spoons.
Our bathroom used to have a mirror but, detached during a repair, it was never replaced. My husband asked whether I wanted the mirror replaced. I said no. He just shrugged. Not because he avoids his own reflection, but because he says appearance doesn’t matter if you’re happy. He says I’m attractive, which I do not dispute anymore because he hates being disputed and because, who knows, it might be true. Probably not, but at least theoretically. Really, who knows?
Not that it matters anymore. Not that it ever should. But long ago, before it did, I was a child with bangs and small, regular features that could turn out either way. I watched my mother scowling into mirrors. Puffing out her cheeks, arching her neck to make a double chin, she punched herself in the stomach and hissed, Fat ugly pig.
You would not find her fat or ugly, nor a pig. She was plump when young. Passersby in Central Park oinked at her. Fatty Fatty Four-by-Four. Or so she said. Why would she lie? But all her life, she had high cheekbones and a fine straight nose and such a flair for makeup, clothes, and silver jewelry that she could have been a cover girl if, in the 1950s, cover girls were plus-size. Which they weren’t. And that’s the point.
She was thirty-three when a bout of ulcerative colitis made her howl with pain and caused her to shed sixty pounds. This painful catastrophic illness did what every diet she had ever tried had failed to achieve. Cortisone eventually relieved her colitis, but by then she was rail thin and had learned how not to eat. She eked out every day for the next fifty years on peppermints and Sanka. Which is how I grew up watching a thin person telling her reflection it was fat. Because while her body had changed, her self-image had not: looking into a mirror at virtual skin and bones, she still saw rolls of blubber. Psychologists have a name for this: body dysmorphia, in which the body you have is not the body you see.
Suggestibility works like this: Say anything enough and it becomes true, or as good as true. Say fat and ugly about a face, any face. Yours. Say it about your face to yourself. Your spouse. Your child to whom you also say that everything you say, and only everything you say, is true. Say it day after day like liturgy and, lo, your jowls stretch, shudder, and sag. The skin spanning your neck and chin becomes a swag. Keep chanting and, after a while, your witnesses—whom you love most—will never trust their eyes again. Fat ugly is the curse that binds them.
This is how I learned that being fat means having failed. That being fat means being ugly. That the fat-thus-ugly are unloved, unworthy, unblessed. This is how I learned that by making you fat, God proves He hates you. If He loved you, He would have given you longer eyelashes. A nicer neck.
And this is how I learned that girls stare into mirrors constantly, which as a girl I must. But I must do it more than other girls because I also learned that our family gains weight around the face. Other families do not. They gain weight in their waists or thighs, which can be camouflaged. But just our luck, a face is always on display.
I grew up glaring into mirrors and whirling around in front of them as if they might yield different results when caught off-guard. But no. Always those same small features, the same face.
At twenty, I quit eating and spent the next few years staring at mirrors while gauging my facial width with calipers.
And this is how I learned that looking into mirrors feels like the end of the world.
Finally I reached a point at which I thought I looked okay. This was a shock. I thought, You got what you wanted. Now stop. When I quit looking into mirrors, I was neither fat nor thin, and neither young nor old, and neither fabulous nor hideous. Smart gamblers know exactly when to fold their cards and walk away. Alcoholics in recovery walk past bars. I walk past glass.
I know more or less how I look. My features have survived my loathing like blithe little rocks. I need not see. Not now. If I start looking worse and worse, I need not know. After a life spent caroling my flaws like a town crier, I owe myself this abstention. Call it denial. Call me weak. Call me a prisoner.
“As I looked in the mirror,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “I screamed, and my heart shuddered: for I saw not myself but the mocking, leering face of a devil.”
Maybe someday I will be over this. Maybe someday I will be normal and gaze at myself and shrug. This has become an era whose perhaps most popular activity is taking pictures of oneself. For those of us who have trouble with mirrors, this feels not like welcome evidence that everyone finally feels okay about their looks but rather like the same old pressure to look good, not merely passable but picture-perfect, smiling-for-the-closeup fabulous. For us, the ascent of the instant self-portrait feels alien and frightening and wrong.
My beef with God is not that He gave me this face but that He gave Mom hers. They say He knows all, yet could He not love her enough to make her look like a movie star?
But then, a face is just a face. Flesh, bone, and apertures. But please put down that camera.
I have spent weeks believing that Heather is shutting me out of her life. Or already has. We are at that peculiar stage in the conclusions of relationships at which one does not know which tense to use. Are? Were? It is that stage at which someone is not totally certain and someone else is. All that remains is a difficult conversation, which may or may not ever occur.
After five years of at-least-weekly contact, Heather no longer answers my e-mails or calls. This silence was not predicated by a bad experience or fight. We spent a Sunday together two months ago. Everything seemed okay. A few more weeks of weekly contact. Then contact from Heather stopped.
I did not realize this at first. I went on e-mailing her and leaving voice mails like an idiot, with no response. I asked Heather to lunch. Silence. I asked again. If this were a cartoon, cue tumbleweeds.
I e-mailed her again, this time inquiring whether she was ill. Cue crickets.
Then I thought: Hey, this is over. She has ended it. Of course! What did I do to make her mad, that mad, or gross her out or whatever it was, because the only possibility is: It was me. I went over our final Sunday in my mind, searching for ways in which I could have inadvertently offended her. Did I forget to ask about her eczema? Did I stare blankly out the window of the restaurant? In which of fifty different manners, while eating my French toast, was I gross?
I did not think: Maybe this has nothing to do with me. Maybe Heather has changed. Maybe she took a sudden all-consuming interest in Ecuador or archery without telling me. Maybe she joined the Coast Guard unexpectedly. Maybe she has new friends to occupy her time. Maybe she lost her mind. Sans clues, how would I know?
Maybe she is busy with work. And/or maybe she is a heartless jerk.
This latter concept sticks in my throat like a fish bone. Alien, yet impossible to ignore. Someone. Else. Could. Be. Rude.
But no. No, no.
We who hate ourselves assume that whatever goes wrong in relationships is all our fault. We assume that whatever goes wrong anywhere, with anything, is our fault—all the more when other people are involved. We perceive ourselves as the last ones picked for every team, wallflowers never asked to dance. So we expect rejection. We expect exclusion, expulsion, being made to walk the plank. We aim to protect ourselves by preparing for certain doom. Soon this will end, we think while being hugged. Soon they will see.
And how sad that will be, we think. But justified. We tried to overcompensate. With everyone we meet, we fake (or so it seems) some form of worthiness. Sometimes we fool even ourselves. But still. When it comes to relationships, we who hate ourselves live on borrowed time, and all our bonds are borrowed too. Or so we think.
But this is totally in our own heads. Our never-ending dread has little bearing on the outside world. That is, unless and until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enter enough relationships already certain you will make them fail and you will make some fail. Predict you will drive everyone away and some will be driven away. Inertia. Reticence. Shuffling with heads hung low, avoiding eye contact, always apologizing, seeking reassurance but no amount is ever enough. To others, these habits of ours are exhausting and boring. Life with us is lots of work. Loving those who hate themselves is like swimming upstream: often more trouble than it is worth.
Sure, we were shunned. Sometime, somewhere. Everyone is. Our error is in thinking we had all those rejections coming, that all those rejections were fair. Our error lies in believing that we are always singled out for exile, predestined to lose, that only we are capable of insult and offense, that only we can irritate, bore, or annoy. That doom awaits us in relationships, in academia, in work, in health, that, with some weird anti-omnipotence, we bring bad news upon ourselves. Our error puts us at the automatic mercy of whomever we might come in contact with. Since all personal interactions bear the possibility of ending in rejection, we approach every connection, even every possible connection, already envisioning its end. Our permission to stay in these relationships is at the whim of others, never us. We have no power. We are not choosers.
Or so we think.
To begin a relationship with this preset belief, that it will end because of us, is to begin with a preset power imbalance. How long before the other person realizes that he or she has been handed all the power, all the rights? How long before he or she tires of total control—or abuses it?
Steve left his forestry job at thirty-two and moved cross-country to live with Bryan. This move was clearly an act of love. But Bryan remained insecure. He posted notes for Steve all over the house, even in Steve’s car, and texted Steve throughout each day. Always the same four words: Do you love me?
From the shower or kitchen or wherever he found a note, Steve shouted Yes. From his car and office, Steve texted Yes. He found the notes endearing for the first few weeks. Then he started to dread seeing them everywhere, looming at him like accusations, as if they read not simply Do you love me? but Tell me the truth, Stephen Ray Jackson! Do you really really REALLY love me???
Steve raised this issue gently with Bryan, who went silent for two days, shuffling around the house avoiding Steve. Then Bryan started posting notes again. Dashboard. Faucet. Refrigerator door. The new notes read Don’t leave me. When Bryan and Steve were out together, Steve would often glance up in a stadium or restaurant to see tears streaming from Bryan’s eyes.
This baffled Steve. He thought: We talked about the notes—okay, now let’s move on. But no. For Bryan, loving Steve meant fearing Steve’s departure. Loving Steve meant fearing Steve.
And in a coda we who hate ourselves know all too well, Steve left. Bryan had driven him away—not with any intrinsic flaws in his own character, but with his fear of driving Steve away.
Familiar. Too familiar. As a child, I asked my parents and best friend—obsessively, like a windup doll—Are you mad at me? Because they often were. The suspense—are they, aren’t they?—was unbearable. And if they were, I needed to know why. Not to defend myself, but to beseech. Because at any given moment lurked the seeds of my dismissal, at their leisure, year on agonizing freefall year.
And thus our declared anti-omnipotent impotence, our predictions of doom become self-fulfilled prophecies. Our dread of rejection triggers rejection. Our fear that we will drive our loves away drives them away. Self-loathing is that powerful. It kills.
We might as well have Dump Me inscribed on our scalps. Such defeatist assumptions put relationships under enormous pressure, as if they—by virtue of being relationships—were not already difficult enough. Our fears reveal our lack of faith and lack of trust, as Steve saw in those notes. Lack of faith and trust smothers love.
So guess what. Heather called me. Confused, not contrite. Busy. Oblivious. Why did you ask if I was sick?
My options flitted through my mind: I could lie. That was just a joke. Apologize. Sorry sorry sorry your silence made me clingy needy begging flailing like the freak you SURELY hate. Or I could tell the truth. Silence makes me assume the worst. Silence has many causes. I understand that.
I finally settled on I was just a bit worried, since I hadn’t heard from you.
And then we just hate ourselves more.
Self-loathing is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is also a perpetual-motion machine.
Because our self-loathing often spurs the kind of unpleasant (but potentially useful) habits detailed in this chapter, we end up hating ourselves even more for having these habits. Self-loathing gives birth to itself and then feeds on itself, forever finding fresh new ways to manifest and make us miserable. In that sense, self-loathing is born pregnant. Because we hate ourselves (and only because we hate ourselves) we do annoying, unpleasant, self-hating things such as lie, apologize, fake it, and assume the worst. We may or may not be conscious of how deeply rooted these habits are, why we have them, how frequently we enact them, or how large a proportion of our personalities they comprise.
But we do know that these habits are annoying and unpleasant. We know that they can make us unappealing to be with. We know this, and we wish we could break these bad habits. So hidden within this über-habit is the yearning, the impetus to break all these other habits. But because each of these habits is a coping mechanism for self-loathing itself, they are nearly impossible to uproot and will sprout again and again as long as we keep hating ourselves.
I want to stop being that person with those quirks. I do not want to be their prisoner. I no longer want everything I say and do, those all-day-all-night words and acts that others mistake for my personality, to simply be translations of one ugly, inconvenient, and unnecessary truth. I do not want to go on thinking these are my real problems, any more than I would want to take an Advil for being on fire.
I don’t want my self-loathing to make me repulsive to others. I don’t want my self-loathing to make me aggravating, draining, self-absorbed, oblivious. I don’t want my self-loathing to resemble a contagious disease, such that spending time with me is like spending time with someone who has leprosy.
Ironically, our bad habits themselves are cause for hope. Perverse as it might seem, credit is due. If these bad habits are all survival strategies, consider what this says about the strength of our survival instinct. All the effort we put into these survival strategies, misguided as it is, is effort nonetheless and vast effort at that. If the false selves enacting these bad habits are guards protecting our true selves from further harm, what valiant guards they are.
And they have fought for us.
Once we begin to redirect that force, the fire and energy poured into our bad habits and false selves into unearthing and undoing our self-loathing, we would marvel at our power. It has been in our grasp all along.
Inner strength spent self-destructively or sagely: both are inner strength.
Hate yourself less: those bad habits will wither, drift away.
We know that even without these habits, we would not be perfect. No one alive is. Freed of these habits—allowed to be someone who chooses boldly and can easily say no—I would still dislike vegetables, be terrible at math, and have asymmetrical ears. But I would be closer to medium.
And see, freed of the quirks and habits detailed in this chapter, we could differentiate between the truly bad about ourselves and the marginal or imaginary bad, the maybe-good and the I am not capable of good. Freed of these habits, we would have nice days now and then, love whom we love, and quickly and effortlessly order dinner. Paradise!
And even if we cannot become fully free, even if echoes of those quirks persist, even if we still sometimes apologize too fervently or try too hard or lie, we will know how and when and where these habits started, what they mean and why. We will know they are not our fault, and that they need not stay.
The light flicks on. The choir sings: Now you know.