Self-Hatred

 It has been a challenge to bring myself to this writing. Examining self-hatred is a painful thing to do. I know this particular form of suffering runs rampant in our world. I know I am complicitous. I know that many of you probably are too. Let’s look together, through the lens of my particular brand of self-hate, at how much damage we participate in.

I am not proud of the way I am. I know I’m probably not over it, and I look forward to the day when I’m old enough and mature enough that I can treat myself as respectfully as the rest of nature. Oh dear, I just realized, I probably do that already. What I need to face, is how much my way of treating myself leaks over into the way I treat everything, and everybody else. This is a hard-earned realization, which is still unfolding.

The horror that rises from realizing that I’ve been treating my loved ones, this beautiful green life, and others, with the same disdain I’ve been heaping on my self, is also compassion-raising. I like that I care enough to take the emotionally-chagrining hit of this glimpse at how misdirected, wrong and oblivious I’ve been. I know that is part of the way forward. Speaking of moving forward, I so want the pain of this recognition to be over. I want to move on to being a better me. But I’m savvy enough now to know that I have to stay in this pain for awhile to realize to a greater extent what I have wrought.

Self-hatred, which is so terribly destructive to self, and other, is a natural occurrence. I have trouble with that. It is so painful, it must mean something is desperately wrong! Not so, but acting like something is wrong, is part of the very same self-hatred that I want to overcome, and don’t want to look at. Continuing to look is extremely painful, disheartening, and paradoxically courageous and compassionate.

What I see is a part of how hard it is to be human. I have the tendency to hate, or have a hard time with, the wild, unruly, uncontrollable parts of my self. They seem to have lives of their own. I tend to hate the parts of me that are other, that threaten to reveal me, or take me into vulnerable and unknown places. Sitting here, in the fire of painful realization, I see, that like my war-mongering, slave-holding ancestors, I discriminate against what I cannot control. I revolt against what threatens me. I hate (that means I actively try to eliminate) the other, both in myself and in the world.

There is nothing quite so humbling as acceptance. I see that I tend to hate my self, and create great damage to others, because my self doesn’t conform to my ideas of who I should be. I think I ought to be what I think I should be. But I’m not. I’ve spent too much of my life not-accepting who and what I am. What I’m learning to accept, is not some spiritual bromide about loving everything, but the fact that my self does not belong to me. I am life’s life.

I am more other than I have ever suspected. I belong to Life, that is what is living through me, using this opportunity to advance creation, exercising an agenda of its own.

From this perspective, born of more painful awareness than I would normally allow myself to endure, I can see that I have so wanted to fit in, to be acceptable on my own terms, that I haven’t accepted my own true nature. In the process I haven’t accepted the true nature of anything or anyone else. My refusal to accept this aspect of who I am has generated a lot of suffering everywhere. I have been like a “typhoid Mary” spreading my suffering around to anyone (or anything) that remotely resembles parts of me I don’t like. And, I haven’t liked, or trusted very much, the parts of me that have never been mine.

The truth is that I have been unwilling to accept my own true nature. I can look at this with some compassion for two reasons. I’ve grown up in this self/other hating culture, and I’ve at last come to the place in my growth where I can handle knowing the truth of this way of being human. Evolution just got to me. The fire of painful realization is growing me.

I don’t like knowing how much suffering I generate. I don’t like looking at the natural holocaust I have helped to create. But, I know that having a vivid experience of these things is a vast improvement. Now I have more choice. Now I have some possibility of doing something different — with myself, and with others (including nature). I am trying to figure out what that is. And honestly, and surprisingly, I like myself better for looking at how much I have let hatred run my life. So, out of this lesson, and my ongoing discovery of the compassion-inducing awfulness of my own choices, comes a new possibility. Maybe, just maybe, I could learn to hold the mystery of my self, and the mysteriousness of the other (in all its myriad of challenging forms) a little more kindly, like the one mystery they are.