It is a strange thing to hate yourself.
It is an odd feeling to realize that the burning feeling of exquisite displeasure and intense desire to get away from someone is directed at the someone you have to look at every day in the mirror.
Its weird to feel the contempt and disgust on your face match the contempt and disgust you hold in your heart and entirely more weird to realize its aimed at you.
It is a hard thing to feel your own heart break by these things and to not care.
It would be merciful if it stopped there, but hatred is never merciful.
The hatred seeps like a poison into everything and spoils it all, making happy memories sour and beautiful things sour.
It turns harmless jokes into spiteful jabs, exaggerates every offense, and then reminds you that the problem is inside your own self and that everyone knows it.
It tells you that because you feel this way, you cannot be really loved by others. Rather, you are pitied, rather like a hurt animal.
This causes you to you feel that you are sub-human.
A freak.
Unlovable. Undesirable. Unable to change.
This causes a dark despair - a sadness devoid of hope - to settle in your soul. It is all-encompassing. Your thoughts and feelings become consumed with hatred and despair. Because of this, you start to notice all the reasons you are as awful as you think you are. This adds to the deepening despair and growing hatred that boils and bubbles like a sludge in your gut until, one day, loathing crawls out of it. Dark, defiant, and terrible. Strong and powerful. Silent and vicious. Its influence changes you and you take on its traits. Your words become cold and sharp like claws, your attitude becomes venom, and your presence is frightful.
This causes people to leave your life because of the thing you've become. Those that don't leave on their own you make sure to push away.
After you've done this, you are alone and your hatred chuckles, the loathing laughs, and they whisper to you that it all your fault.
They then turn their backs on you and despair's deafening silence crushes you.
That is what its like to hate yourself.
You seem like an intelligent human; you have a beautiful affinity for words, which shows you've obviously experienced enough of life to have seen its ups and downs. Why, then, must you linger on the downs? To be able to understand and feel these "downs" in such an intense way, you must also know intense joy. Is your pain, selfishness, hurt, and self-defeat so deeply rooted that you cannot recognize joy for itself? "Men are that they might have joy. . . " Christ didn't sacrifice his life, barely able to beg the Father if there was not another way, just so that we could take what beauty and peace He has given us and taint it with anger and negativity. Even when we feel as though we can not be loved, even in the slightest, Christ loves us beyond what we can comprehend. It's in the warmth of the sun, it's in the rustle of the leaves when the sweet breeze blows, it's in that extra minute the professor was later than you were, it's in that perfectly timed green light that gets you to work on time, it's in the long-lost note from an old friend, it's even in the random comment on a blog from a stranger. It doesn't have to start as much, but I know that when we start to try and see the little blessings and testimonies of the Saviors love, we begin to see the world differently, and eventually, ourselves. Just a kindly thought from a passerby.
ReplyDeleteI pray that the arms of the Lord's love will surround you in your troubles and that you might allow Him to penetrate the wall you appear to have built around your heart. You are loved by many. You are a Chosen Son of the Almighty.
You are "an ordinary man in love with dancing and music trying to find the exuberance inside his soul." It exists, you said so yourself.
Oh! And here is this, I thought you might consider glancing through. Best of luck to you, Friend.
Deletehttps://www.lds.org/ensign/1988/01/sorrow-and-joy-what-we-can-learn-from-lehi?lang=eng
Thank you, whomever you are. I am grateful for your advice, and it was good for me to realize that I do tend to dwell on the negative rather than the positive. I'm working to correct this problem and I welcome any and all advice on how that could best be achieved. I hope I don't come off as negative all the time, its just that there is a fair bit of negativity I am having to face that's built up over the years.
DeleteThis post was the product of several hard weeks in a row and was mostly to get it out of my head and heart and place it into a space where I can process it. Sort of to "name my monster" and then be able to plan the attack.
Again, thank you for your comment. It makes me feel both excited and scared to know that there are indeed people reading this. And thank you for your comment about how I write. I try to use my words to paint an accurate picture with enough feeling poured in to allow the reader to see out of my eyes and feel what is in my heart - things I know others experience as well. I want to try and give those who ache a voice, and I will (thanks to your comment) try do do so a bit more positively.
Thank you and all the best,
Josh