So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I eat. Weird, I know, but just go with me on this. I have a history of emotional eating/food addiction and binge eating. I recently had a relapse into this behavior and I kept asking myself why.
A conversation that basically went something like this:
“Micah, why are you eating crap when you know it makes you feel shitty and you’re only going to regret it? Why are you doing this to yourself? No one is forcing you to eat this way; this is coming from you. Why do you eat like someone who hates himself?”
And my reply was simple, “because I do hate myself.”
“Is that true?” I asked myself in genuine surprise. “Do you really hate yourself? You’ve been doing so much work on self-acceptance; loving and accepting yourself for who you are. Hasn’t that meant anything? Haven’t you learned anything from all that work? How can you still hate yourself?”
It took some time to answer this question, but I was finally able to answer it: “Because hating myself is the only way to be right.”
It has taken me some time to unpack the idea of what “being right” in this context means and it’s not any one thing, but a combination of things.
First, as an overweight kid I experienced a lot of rejection. I was hurt and betrayed practically on a daily basis. And then I realized something. Rather than waiting for people to make fun of me (and I knew they would), I would beat them to the punch and make fun of myself. And guess what? It worked! It was almost as if everyone was saying, “oh hey, we don’t have to make fun of him (as much), because he’ll do it himself.” And while the teasing didn’t end, it changed the way people reacted to me. Suddenly, people were laughing “with” me and I actually felt like I was getting along with people. Putting myself down, i.e., learning to hate myself, made other people “like” me. I learned that people like you better when you hate yourself. Therefore, hating myself was the right thing to do to have friends.
Second, I never felt like I was good enough to warrant my parent’s time or affection. I’ve blogged about all this before, so it’s pointless to hash it all out here again, but just to apply this to my current topic… People who are worthless don’t “deserve” their parent’s time and affection. Since I didn’t deserve my parent’s time and affection, I felt worthless. The only thing you can do with something worthless is to hate it, ergo, it’s “right” to hate worthless things.
Third, I thought the only way for me to be "right" before God was to hate myself. I believed that self-hatred was essentially the same as humility. Or, in other words, being humble by acknowledging my worthlessness before Him was the only way to be "right" before Him. Also, I was afraid of God’s punishment just for being me. (And YES, being a “gay Mormon” has everything to do with this, but that is a huge topic and a whole other blog post!!) I thought that if I could punish myself enough, then He would have compassion on me and not punish me Himself. It’s ironic. My whole life I have professed to know God as a loving Father, and yet, here I am believing that He only wants to punish me.
In every case, hating myself felt right because it was reliable, it was something I could count on, and it always worked. It satisfied every explanation for what was wrong in my life. And it allowed me to have some weird kind of control in my life because I couldn’t count on anything else. Hating myself was more than just a feeling, it was something I could DO; even when it meant that what I was doing was harming myself. Hating myself for being worthless applied to everything and it was an answer for everything: my parent’s and friend’s rejection, every failure, being a disappointment, being fat and ugly, being molested even. I thought that only people who have worth are protected and spared such horrors and that “safety” was well worth hating myself for. I was miserable, but I was safe.
Miserable, but safe.
These three little words seem to have defined my life up until this point. For most of my life, the need for safety outweighed the need for happiness. For the last couple of years at least, I’ve been approaching that tipping point – the point where the misery is just too much of a burden, a shackle, rather than a life line. In other words, the need for happiness becoming more important than the need to find safety in self-harm.
As I have been working on self-acceptance, seeing my past for what it was and seeing myself for who I am, I feel “growing pains” of an emotional kind. It’s scary giving up the “safety” of self-hatred. It’s terrifying accepting myself for who I am – a flawed, imperfect man who just wants to be a good man. It’s terrifying because just being me means I may not be “right” before God; it means I was probably all wrong about how I interpreted my parents treatment of me; it means I can’t control whether or not people like/accept me/approve of me. Giving up control, whether real or imagined, is terrifying. It means opening myself up to the possibility that I’m not safe, or that I may not be safe… that I’m going to be wrong, imperfect, etc.
As I was working through the twisted “logic” of hating myself in order to “be right,” I had a moment of innocent realization. “I just don’t want to hurt myself anymore.” And for a moment, I felt the sweetness of self-compassion.
I often see and hear messages of the need for self-love and self-compassion and I have believed that those concepts were great advice… for others. I never felt like that advice applied to me – again, because I thought hating myself was the only way to be “right.” But for a moment, I did feel self-compassion and that moment taught me a few things.
First, I only know what self-love looks like because I have known what self-hatred looks like. For the first time in my life, I now have something to contrast with self-hatred. (This idea explains the title of this blog post.) And this is NOT a minor point – the contrast is necessary. Maybe – for me personally – I needed to hate myself in order to know what loving myself should look like. Indeed, as Lehi, a Book of Mormon prophet taught, “There must needs be opposition in all things.” Life happens in the opposition; growth overcoming entropy; faith in the furnace of affliction;
Second – and please know that I am NOT in any way shape or form advocating self-hatred as a path to self-love – what I have learned is that there is great power in gratitude for where I have been because it was all a part of the journey that got me to where I am now. I could continue to lament the years I spent in self-hatred, to regret all of the things I didn’t do, or missed out on, but what good would that do me now? None. Instead, I can look back and say, it happened. And it led me on a path to finding self-love – no, more than that, to seeing the NEED for self-love and self-compassion. I truly believe that my poor health, being overweight, being sick, etc., is all somehow tied to years of hating myself and wanting to hurt myself.
In all of this reflection I have “climbed a mountain” of understanding and while I appreciate the view, I am, once again, at a precipice. I can back down this mountain the way I came and ease into the safety of self-loathing once again. Or I can jump into the unknown of self-love.
I choose to jump.
Why? Because I believe that there are arms to catch me; the arms of unconditional love. Love without condition. Think about that. Pure love – love with no strings attached, no conditions, no expectations. Just a love freely offered that says: I love you for who you are – all of you; I accept you for who you are – flaws and strengths, imperfections and gifts, all of it, ALL of you!
I didn’t know it, but all my life I’ve been looking for someone to love me in a way that would allow me to escape my prison of self-hatred. Someone who could just hold me, for no other reason than to be close to me; someone who could be affectionate with me; someone who could truly see all of me – the good AND the bad – and somehow love me just as much for having both – unconditionally.
Somehow, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think I’ll find that from another human being, until I can do that for myself. Maybe it was good to hate myself for a time, but the best thing I can do now is to learn to love myself, unconditionally.
