A Word of Hesitancy
I’m afraid of making this post too “watch what you think” in the vein of “thoughts become things”. In a world where so many of us are battling anxious thoughts, intrusive thoughts, downright damning thoughts, this concept is terrifying. While I do believe we can steer our thoughts around and therefore we have a modicum of “control” over our thoughts, this takes years of practice and it isn’t always true. Sometimes we think things and we have no grip on the leash of the source, let alone control over it.
There’s also a part of me nervous about driving this into “you are what you say you are” territory, even though that’s precisely what I will be saying if not in so many words (…or maybe in so many words). The truth is occasionally we say terrible things about ourselves. Should we stop? Immediately. But this can lead to an ouroboros of eating our self-worth—we speak self-hatred, we chastise ourselves for it, we berate ourselves for all of the above, and by the time we’re done, we’ve eaten alive any sense of peace within our core, which is truly the opposite of what I want from this post.
As you read, please bear in mind you will not bring a curse to your family if you have a negative thought or say something harsh about yourself. You will not damn your entire life or the lives of your loved ones or your future lineage. Please resist the urge to make this a hopscotch of jumping over anything you perceive as negative in your mind or from your mouth. Remember humanity is rooted in failure and if you attempt to steer yourself to perfection, the only possible outcome is that you will fail.
There is no reason to beat yourself up over it when you do.
Is that enough of a preamble? Let’s begin.
Carrying Projections
I spent most of my teenage years in an egoic sense of self-loathing. Self-harm, depression, suicidal thoughts, therapists, crying, rage, confusion, God delusions… some of this will be standard for you, too, and some of it won’t. But maybe everyone can hear me when I say, I hated myself yet I knew I deserved love.
I did not grow up in complete misery. My childhood wasn’t full of horrors, even though horrible things happened. But the weight of projections from those who should have shielded me from just that was extremely heavy. Dysfunctional people were constants in my life—as were functional ones, thankfully—and they had not yet learned how to deal with their own horrors (true ones; and they still have not learned, as best I can tell) and thus they thrust them onto me.
Projection. What we typically do with our shadow side when we are not vigilintantly working on integrating it. When it spills out onto a child, it is as if this child is raised beneath the sticky slime of their caregivers’ worst memories and experiences and thoughts. Trying to stand tall beneath this is nearly impossible. It can crack our spines, buckle our knees.
Children often shrink beneath.
Sometimes we drown.
Often, we find ourselves shallow breathing our way through life, well into adulthood.
Suffice to say, there were people around me who contributed to my quickly deteriorating mental health when I was a teenager, and the sensitivity I was born with likely added to my suffering. In addition, I was struggling with mental illnesses no one could yet name.
What I remember most about this stage of my life wasn’t what people did or said to me but rather, how I felt about me (this is why we must be careful with children; if we trap them in the sticky net of our shadow projections, it will take them decades—if not longer—to realize your unresolved trauma was never about them).
I felt horrible about myself, in a word. Physical loathing, emotional loathing, everything coalescing into soul loathing. At that time, the idea that I could change my thoughts about myself was unheard of in my world, let alone normalized.
It wasn’t a concept at all.
In a search for relief, for some way to feel better, I looked around and saw nothing but vanity: Lose weight to feel better, wear makeup to feel better, get cooler clothes to feel better, have a more popular friend group to feel better, bleach your hair to feel better, be hot to feel better. Everything was rooted in the agreement that no, you’re not enough as you are, and yes, if you only appeared cooler, thinner, hotter, you would have an easier time in life (and maybe if you were also the perfect child while you’re at it, your family would get their shit together, too).
That is probably something most women can relate to at some level. We are, after all, living in a world which tells us being hot is absolutely vital for our survival. Without beauty, society says, we are nothing.
I learned this early on and I did not have the benefit of anyone around me being self-aware and rooted in center enough to say, You are gorgeous, and mean it on a deeper level (remember, they’re battling their shadows, too).
It felt to me as if I had to claw and fight and bleed for a compliment, and that feeling infected me so deeply that self-loathing and inherently self-destructive thoughts were my day-to-day, minute-to-minute.
If your brain poisons you in this way as a person still developing, the rot is hard to scrub off. The slime, if you will, infects bone deep.
Every word I said to myself was damning. Every scrap of affection from friends and lovers and teachers shook off the hellish nature of my inner world, but only for a moment. When I was left alone, I was still not thin, pretty, perfect enough and forget how intelligent I was or how deeply, painfully self-aware and intuitive. Forget my sarcastic humor, my ability to make people feel at ease or terrified, my voracious vocabulary or bleeding heart. None of that mattered in the face of the physical and thus, none of it mattered when it came to matters of my well-being. I was not enough in my head, and thus, I was not enough, full stop. At my lowest, I did not deserve to take up space in the world, and while I was afraid of death, sometimes I was afraid of living more.
Therapists, medication, doctors, religion, prayer, intense conversations about being sent away to be fixed, etc, were the norm around me at this time (to my knowledge, a focus on healing of the adults in my life was either nonexistent, or bare bones, at best).
While I believe my parents were doing their best to help me in the ways they knew how, I can now say quite frankly that none of it did (the prayer may have which may surprise some of you that I would say such a thing, but that’s for another topic, another day).
This is not the part of the post where I introduce to you my savior and guiding light and “this is what healed me” link so you, too, can click it and join me on this levitation journey of wholeness where everything is bathed in golden light and I fly around the world with the wings of an enlightened fairy.
The journey hasn’t ended. It never does. But it has progressed, and it has done so beautifully.
Where therapy, medicine, medical teams, and pastors failed, turning into myself—that very poisonous, sticky, gladiator arena where I was hunting me—is what ultimately brought me out of the depths and helped me see past the madness.
Becoming enchanted with the very soul I was raging against—my own—has been the medicine I have returned to for decades and no guru, doctor, or religious leader could possibly do more for me more than that sacred act has.
If you are not a paid subscriber, the post ends here. Below the paywall, I go into more detail on my personal journey and experiences, which is partly why the paywall exists at this point. It is terrifying to share some parts of this journey, and this gives me a feeling of containment. I also delve into what slowly worked for me in scaling past self-hatred and loathing, and there is a voice note embedded in the post as well. If you’re ready, you can upgrade to a paid subscriber here. I greatly appreciate any and all of you who support this work.