What I Learned From Hating Myself
10 min read
Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash
Most of my life I didn’t like myself. I had anxiety, I took everything personally and I always felt like a victim. I was a special snowflake who thought that no one will ever get me. I was so used to wallowing in negativity that at times I was completely consumed by it. I really hated people that were too positive.
I remember saying things like, “What’s the point of doing it if I know I’ll f*ck up” or “Damn I want to take this smug off his face, how in the hell can he be smiling all the time? Did he get a blowjob from Buddha or something? ”
So as you can tell, I was very fun at parties. I also had a sh*tload of acne in my teenage years, so that didn’t help either. (thanks genetics)
But I slowly, VERY F*CKING SLOWLY, got over it. It took me approximately 23 years. (I’m 25 now, where’s my cake?)
But here’s the good part, it can take you way faster. The only reason it took me so long it’s because I kind of enjoyed being miserable. In fact for about 2 years I wrote music and explored the darkest parts of my psyche. It was quite a trip.
Then my ex (first love) saw me in that miserable state and gave me a book from OSHO (a weird Indian pseudo-philosopher, but hey he’s still kind of cool if you cherry-pick his work) and it honestly changed my life. It was the first book that made me question the way I think and made me more aware of my own emotions. What happened after that was about 5 years of obsession with philosophy and psychology and self-improvement. I live and breathe that stuff (Thank you Jordan Petersons and Sam Harisses and Albert Camuses and Kim Kardashians etc)
So now let me get on my high horse of grandiose and tell you the lessons I’ve learned from hating myself. I promise it will be fun. Grab the popcorn.(or kale, whatever you’re into, health nut)
1. It works
Hating yourself is a full-time job. Oh baby, you thought it’s just a pastime activity? Oh no, it consumes all your time. It’s a dedication, and if you persist, you become VERY good at it. And it really, REALLY works. Hating yourself is such a reliable full-time job that not even another housing market crash like in 2008 or A Great Depression like in 1930’s would make you lose this job. And if you become complacent, you’ll keep it for life and you’ll get all the benefits like shorter life expectancy, heart disease, ruined relationships, crippling isolation, and the privilege of being able to truly appreciate the music of Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, and Dan Balan.
So what does this mean? It means that you can decide: do you want to keep this job or do you want to try something else for a while? Imagine that inner voice of yours that tells you “you’re worthless” is your boss. Now your boss gave you permission to take a short vacation to the “LoveYourselfLand”. (Stop laughing and let’s pretend this is happening)
But the drawback is that you have to pay for the plane ticket, and the weather forecast doesn’t look good, in fact there’s a good chance you’ll fly into a storm along the way. But the plane (your brain) is built well and is very capable of flying through that storm. Its wings and metal parts can sustain a lot of extreme bending without breaking (neuroplasticity). You might feel some turbulence (stress and self-doubt) but statistically speaking you’ll get through just fine, and you’ll enjoy the results in the long-run. In fact, you’ll be so surprised you’ll start recommending other people to fly more and to do it in spite of their fears. And then you’ll go to Tibet and breathe in a small room until you die. (Okay, the last part is not necessary)
So what are you waiting for? YOLO! Give it a try, love yourself.
2. How you talk to yourself is who you become
“The way you think about yourself determines your reality. You are not being hurt by the way people think about you. Many of those people are a reflection of how you think about yourself.” — Shannon L. Alder
Research shows that the way you talk to yourself plays a major role in determining your mental health. The first step is identifying that nagging inner voice. Listen to it. What is it saying? “You’re a loser”, “you know you can’t do it”, “why did you say that?” or is it more like “you’re a piece of cardboard recycled in a Chinese factory full of depressed people why are you even alive omg stop embarrassing yourself you beautiful little dog poop wow wait a second look at you you’re not that bad in fact you’re pretty awesome let’s be friends and ride the unicorns on the rainbows of our destiny!”
Well, if you’re just hating yourself and you’re not (yet) on psychedelic drugs, then it’s probably not the last quote.
Also, here’s a really cool video with animations about that inner voice from the lovely channel The School Of Life.
Fine, so you found that voice. Now this article mentioned a research paper which shows that the language you use against that voice actually matters quite a lot:
“When practicing self-talk, don’t refer to yourself in the first person, such as “I” or “me.” Instead, refer to yourself in the third person, using “he” or “she,” or refer to yourself by name.
Brené Brown, professor at the University of Houston Graduate College and motivational speaker, refers to the negative voices in her head as her gremlins. By giving her negative thoughts a name, she’s both stepping away from them and poking fun at them.
The report goes on to say that using the third person in self-talk can help you step back and think more objectively about your response and emotions, whether you’re thinking about a past event or looking into the future. It can also help you reduce stress and anxiety.”
I know I know. You like talking sh*t to yourself. It’s become a part of your self-deprecating humor. I like Rick and Morty and Family Guy too. But that is fiction. And your life isn’t fiction. So get your head out of your own ass and stop being a masochistic prick. If negative self-talk can affect your mental health, then so can positive self-talk. Our brains are cool like that. It’s called neuroplasiticty dawg. It’s the ability of the brain to change throughout your life. (the proportion of grey matter can change, and synapses may strengthen or weaken over time)
And if somebody told you that the brain isn’t flexible in adulthood — it’s complete BS and a lazy excuse, as this research clearly shows, and as this TED talk clearly shows as well.
3. It’s necessary for your growth
The lovely fella Stephen Fry once said, “It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.”
Maybe it’s just a romantic thought, maybe it’s the way our brains rationalize everything in order to create a coherent story and make us function, but we all know the saying “in order to grow you need to suffer”. Maybe there is a human-unicorn somewhere in the world that just gets it without experiencing suffering, and to that human-unicorn I’d say: “screw you you lucky little bastard and stop smiling all the time I’m busy with my suffering mkay?”
The ability to reflect on our own suffering and create something from it might be the most bittersweet human quality there ever was.
Arguably, without suffering we wouldn’t have had Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky, Stephen Hawking, Beethoven, Frida Kahlo, Orwell, Churchill, Kierkegaard, Hemingway, hamburgers, and American Idol.
We would also have nothing to talk about. Like seriously, imagine we were these perfect beings living in eternal bliss, with no struggles, no stories of underdogs, or tragic betrayals, or revenge, or f*ckups? We’d have no Shawshank Redemption, no Dark Knight, no Black Mirror, no Shakespeare, no Tom & Jerry, no True Detective, no Miorița, no Princess Mononoke, no Socrates, no Oldboy, no Game of Thrones, no Igor Cuciuc, no Memento, no Westworld, no Tarkovsky, no Howard The Duck and no Justin Bieber: Never Say Never????
UGH, disgusting isn’t it? BORING. CURTAINS DOWN. I’M OUT.
4. It gets old
Oh it really does. Hating yourself consistently is like watching 50 Shades of Grey for the 20th time and cringing at the underwhelming sex scenes. Sure, you know that a lot of great artists hated themselves at least once in their lives so you want to “touch their magic” by indulging into suffering and self-deprecation. But then you see the same sex scenes again and again (how boring it becomes to hate yourself) and it’s so disappointing that you wonder why did you even pay for the ticket instead of watching porn (fail videos) on YouTube.
Hating yourself and nagging and repeating the same negative thoughts over and over is like being that old guy that repeats the same childhood stories over and over and over again and whoever you’re talking to is politely trying to position his body in a way that screams “I wanna get the f*ck outta here please stop talking” but you don’t stop because hating yourself is your full-time job and you want your benefits. You want to feed your ego, you want to maintain your self-imposed identity because it’s so familiar to you.
“The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But instead of coming out of this process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in annihilating itself. Hyper-criticism eventuates in self-hatred, leaving behind it only ruins.” — Pascal Bruckner
5. It’s not only about you (you affect other people)
Oh what’s that? You thought it only concerns you and you are this special suffering little creature? Well I’m here to disappoint you dear. It’s never just about you. The way you act in the world, want it or not, affects other people. It’s not to say that you should care a lot about their feelings, that’s up to you, (caring too much is unhealthy too) but please stop pretending that you’re an isolated island in the middle of The Pacific Ocean getting brutally hit by the waves. Your suffering stems from human nature, and you are NEVER alone in it. The earlier you realize this, the better it is for you in the long-term.
I’ve noticed this from my own experience — the slow transition from a negative little sh*t to a more balanced person has shown me all the ugly sides of my own self-delusion. That self-delusion was mainly the narcissistic thought that my misery concerns me and me only. As I’ve looked at my relationships with people from the past, I’ve noticed clear patterns where my way of being made them more negative, I thrived in being this walking self-loathing blob of misery without genuine concern for others, but I didn’t realize that people mirror other people. We are so tribal and interconnected, yet we forget about it sometimes.
Try it, it works, trust me. Go outside and be miserable, and when you talk to people, try to be as negative as you can, you’ll see how you affect the way they talk, and if you persist, you may even change the way they think about themselves.
Or you can choose to be more responsible in the way in which you act in the world. It doesn’t mean that you must be this happy little unicorn with magic rainbow farts, but you should be more aware of yourself. Be kind to yourself. Compassion. Realize that you are human and you are allowed to f*ck up while at the same time trying your best to uplift others and relate to their suffering.
If you’re not yet convinced, I’d recommend the best eye-opener — books. Read the likes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anne Frank, Franz Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Marcus Aurelius, Emil Cioran and many others.
Read other bloggers who write about their personal reflections. Talk and learn how to properly listen to people. You will be surprised of how many of us — even the “happy” ones — are struggling with the same things as you do. And that will connect you to yourself, and only then will you be able to truly connect with others. Be vulnerable, stop sniffing your own ass, it stinks.
As the American novelist James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
Or as the participant of the German Resistance movement against Nazis Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”
6. Conclusion?
Right, you want the conclusion, THE LIST, the TLDR version of this. Ugh, fine. Here it is you gorgeous little lazy koala:
1. Hating yourself is a full-time job, and it comes with “benefits” (If you’re in it — you’re in it)
2. You can decide if you want to keep this job or not. Take a short vacation to “LoveYourselfLand”, you might like it.
3. Self-talk is VERY powerful. What does your inner voice say? You can kick it in the balls. Just… you know… don’t actually kick yourself in the balls.
4. You CAN CHANGE. Your brain is VERY FLEXIBLE even in adulthood. It’s MAGIC. Poof. Use it.
5. Suffering may be necessary for your growth. Be patient and learn from it.
6. Constantly hating yourself is like watching 50 Shades of Grey for the 20th time. STOP IT. It’s boring and it gets old. Want some kissy kissy oh ah the feelings? Go watch the Before Trilogy, it’s actually really good.
7. Don’t get attached to your suffering. It’s NOT an identity. It’s just emotions, and emotions are fleeting.
8. You’re NOT the only one. LOTS of people suffer, in the same ways and in different ways. Read books, learn to LISTEN to people. You’ll be surprised of how you share the same struggles.
9. STOP sniffing your own ass, be vulnerable and be curious about other people.
10. I totally wrote this just to get to number 10. BECAUSE EVERYONE LIKES TOP 10!!! (including me)
Thanks, bye.