This Lenten season, I
have given up self-loathing.
I'm doing okay so far.
Not great, though I never expected to stop hating myself altogether –
you don't lose the habit of a lifetime just by deciding to give it up
for Lent – but I've at least managed to steer clear of wallowing.
In
the week or so running up to Ash Wednesday, it was very, very bad.
Curl-up-under-my-desk-and-sob bad.
Sit-in-the-back-seat-and-cry-silently-to-myself bad. When I get mired
in it like that, it's very difficult to extricate myself, because
it's self-perpetuating: I hate myself, and then I hate myself more
for being so self-absorbed as to be thinking about how much I hate
myself... It feeds itself.
So
on Ash Wednesday I said to myself sternly: This ends now. For the
next forty days, there will be no wallowing.
I've
kept to that resolution pretty well, I think. Usually it present
itself as a very stark
choice between paths – THIS WAY TO THE QUAGMIRE OF
SELF-LOATHING – and I just have to force myself to pick the sunny
one. (No, inner voices, you're the
worthless pieces of shit.) Unfortunately, I have not yet found a way
to shut off the constant lower-level white noise of self-hatred that
accompanies my every waking moment.
It
feels as though that low-level stuff has stepped up its game in the
past couple of months, but I don't think this is actually the case. I
think what's happened is an increase in my self-awareness,
to the point that I am now fully cognizant of (a) just how much
self-loathing I've been carrying around in my brain-holder and (b)
the possibility that maybe I should be trying to change that. (I also
blame heightened self-awareness for the amplified gender identity
struggle, which is not an entirely separate issue from the
self-loathing one.)
This
is not easy. Externally, my life is as
close to perfect as it's ever been, and maybe it's because I feel
I don't deserve such happiness that I torture myself so.
Fiction
used to be enough. For at least a dozen years now, I've had one
particular ongoing fictional world in which I spend at least a little
time every single day. It sufficed as a channel, a coping mechanism,
for my self-loathing (and, actually, some of my gender issues too).
But lately that's not enough. I can't funnel it all into a world of
my imagining anymore. I can't pretend
my brain is made of tiny boxes. The walls are coming down, and I
don't know what to do.
But,
in my moments of optimism and faith, I can believe that what I am
facing right now is the refiner's fire, and that I will be purified.
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