I honestly don’t think that I have done anything really awful, anything that I could not forgive another human being. I’ve been spiteful and selfish at times, and dishonest too, to the point of stealing. But mostly that was when I was a child, they were childish mistakes, born from my inability to judge situations, recognise other people’s feelings or to control my own impulses. I’ve hurt people’s feelings, certainly, but then we all do that from time to time, and I do try not to, and to mend when I realise I’ve done damage inadvertently. And often I struggle to protect myself when others act in ways that hurt me, because I can’t tell where their rights end and mine start.
I realise that I’m protesting too much – that, however hard I try to be good, I never seem to be able to convince myself that I am not actually, deep down, disgusting, nasty and somehow dangerous. I feel like I have been saying this to my therapist over and over and over: that there is something badly wrong with me, that I try to hide it from others, and also to keep it pushed right down so that it can’t harm anyone else and make me an even worse person than I already am, but that it’s real and it’s always there.
I am puzzled what it is that makes me so horrible, when I try so hard to be good, and usually that is where I get stuck: hurt by this self-loathing that is obviously unfair, but impervious to reasoning. This week it came up again as I was worrying about messing up at work. I think that actually I have been doing well in difficult circumstances, but nobody is explicitly telling me so, and so I have nothing to hold on to when the slide down the vortex of childhood nightmares begins. Because my job is changing in response to my request, I worry about being perceived as a troublemaker, not sufficiently grateful for what I’ve got. And I wonder why anyone would take the trouble of trying to accommodate my wishes, my needs; I feel disposable. I feel worthless. This feeling of worthlessness had just really hit me when the dreaded words “we’ve run out of time” came. The weight of all that rubbish, filth, shit that I carry with me, that I feel I am, was crushing me. I was aching for him to take that burden off me, but I knew he couldn’t; nobody can.
Some time later, as I was dragging myelf through the swamp of memories that were (and still are) flooding my mind, it began to dawn on me that it is other people who did, and do, see me like that: as disposable, easy to walk away from; a toy that’s no longer fun, a tissue to wipe your sticky fingers on and throw away. I don’t have to see myself that way. My therapist won’t tell me, however much I long for him to do so, but I am absolutely sure that he does not think of me like that.
I don’t have to think of myself that way, but those memories are still there, and so is the fear that when something goes wrong, the blame will end up with me, and so will the shame and the self-disgust. I don’t know how to stop them, but I’ll try to remember that I don’t have to think of myself like that anymore.
obstinatelyalien 