How To Hate Yourself

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Wake up everyday feeling like you want to go straight back to bed. Sorry, I know that’s a super intense way to start the how-to, but hating yourself is pretty much the most intense thing ever. So there you go. Digest that.

Get ready for the day. Dread looking at yourself in the mirror because what you see will make you want to put a paper bag over your head. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Grendel or a Gisele. If you hate yourself, you’re always a Grendel. You could whittle yourself down to 90 pounds and still say things like, “My shoulder blade looks ugly! The veins in my arm are so sick looking!” Most of the time you’ll keep these insane thoughts to yourself, but sometimes you’ll vocalize them to someone who doesn’t hate themselves and they’ll tell you, “What do you mean?! You’re so beautiful, oh my god. You’re nuts!” Your friend does not realize that they are wasting their time with these compliments. Their perception pales in comparison to the power of your  own self-loathing. There is no logic to hating yourself, which makes it all the more difficult to fix. If someone sees the color blue when they should be seeing grey, how do you get them to see what’s actually there?

Never really believe in the choices you make. Eat tacos for dinner and wonder if you should’ve had spaghetti. Take three hours to get dressed in the morning because it’s impossible to find an outfit you feel ok in. Apologize for everything. “I’m sorry I’m here taking up space. I’m sorry I’m ten minutes early. I’m sorry for all it.” No need to apologize, self-loathing person. We’re sorry that you’re sorry.

Who didn’t love you when you were younger? Who didn’t come to your little league games? Who made you feel like a waste of space? It’s hard to believe that self-loathing is innate. It just slowly piles on in your childhood and before you know it, you’re throwing up your dinner and dating someone who is incapable of loving you back. You were born with the capacity to love yourself and then something or someone stole it from you. Now you’re too depressed to want it back.

If you hate yourself, you might never know true love. Not just with yourself (that will require years of therapy and numerous servings of lithium ice cream) but from others. You see, assholes have a sixth sense for people with low self-esteem. Like a meek moth to a vengeful flame, they invariably end up together. It makes sense. If you think you’re a piece of shit, you want to be with someone who will treat you like shit. Because it’s what you think you deserve. If you actually met someone nice, you would freak out and think, “Why is this person actually treating me with care and compassion? What a turnoff! We will never work out. We don’t see eye-to-eye on anything. They think I’m the bees knees when I’m clearly dogshit. What a nutjob!”

Be permanently exhausted. Hating yourself is a full-time job and you do not get any benefits. Maybe that’s why sad people always think they’re fat. The weight of inferiority is so extreme that you feel like you’re the size of an IMAX screen. You only start to shed the metaphorically pounds when you’re able to see yourself for what you really are. But it might be awhile until that happens.

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image – Wikipedia