My Greatest Enemy Was My Self

This is hard to write about.  It's a story without really any clear beginning or end.  Nevertheless...

I keep on meeting Meeting people (Plymouth Brethren people) afflicted with something I was once far more under the spell of than I am now.  It was a specific kind of self-defeating, paralyzing, life-halting shame.  Fear of hoping.  Feeling like life was just here to mock me.

  I remember always speaking of myself as the exception.  I deserved special bad luck.  And I also didn't deserve it, but I would have it, wouldn't I? (because I was me).  Other people deserved praise.  I didn't.  Well, sometimes I did, but I wouldn't get it, no.  I'd say "Oh, but of course I [and then something bad]."  No hyperbole was too much for me.  I had no shame when it came to self-loathing. I would start any number of sentences with "I am the worst..." or "I am the most..." depending on whether it was something good or bad, respectively.
  I tried to literally expect only bad stuff in order to try to not be upset by it.  I pretended good stuff wasn't coming, so if it fell through, I could supposedly soften that (not that that ever actually works.)  I did this all the time.  

  If I did something good, I couldn't handle praise, but pointed out the defective parts, or how far whatever it was fell short of ideal, or else I overemphasized any slight help I'd gotten from anyone else, and generally presented the success as a blip, as a fluke, as something no one should expect me to be able to repeat.  

  If, conversely, I screwed up, or if anyone accused me of anything, I approached THAT with a resigned "Of course..." attitude.  Of course I screwed up, because I was a screw up. And also, of course people were being unfair to me and judging me too harshly, because people do that to "someone like me." It was so unfair.  (Also, I kinda deserved it, I felt.) I was the most horrible person in the world, but did people have to be so mean about that? I actually had to live it.

  I presented myself as two very different bad things: an unfairly put upon person with the luck of Charlie Brown, and someone who was a misfit, a freak, who didn't belong, who was thoroughly unlikeable.  I told this to everyone who said they liked me, or acted like it either.

  Now, one could have accused me of just fishing for compliments, but it was more like I was trying to talk myself into the horror that I believed was me.  Like I was trying to remind myself lest I forget to accept that I was a horrible person, an abomination, a misfit, just plain defective in most ways.

No Amount of Compliments Made Me Accept Myself

When I was 22 I had a job working with the developmentally handicapped.  The secretary at the main office there was about ten years older than me, and she was very nice to me, as older women invariably are with me.  One time, after she'd heard more of my self-loathing talk, she came in with a list she'd written up. She had done her best to write down all of my virtues.  It was a fairly long list.  She said I was a "sculpture," for one thing.  I think she meant a "sculptor" (Thing #3: I could spell things)  because I'd been making some things out of clay and wood, but as I'd spent a summer doing landscaping work, I was more sculpted than usual.  I know that now. Of course then I was filled with the conviction of how hideous and stupid-looking I was.  And not a single thing she wrote, or even her effort to try to make me see that my view of myself was as flawed as an anorexic's, had much effect.  (I don't think.  Not immediately anyway.) I knew, you see, that I was hideous and horrible and bad.

  I knew that I had moles, some on my face. I needed glasses.  I could be clumsy.  I stammered when I got nervous and said the weirdest things.  I didn't like sports.  I did like science fiction.  One of my ears was slightly lower than the other.  My legs were short.  And I farted.

  If girls hit on me, I panicked, because they were obviously mistaken.  If girls I liked didn't like me back, I told myself I should have known better than to hope.  If I got a job, I expected to lose it soon enough.  If I didn't get it, I'd been a fool to hope, of course.

  Altogether, I felt like God had made me to laugh at and toy with.  I probably read the story of Job too much.

  I wish I could tell you the tale of how I beat all that and got better, one blustery week in fall of the year.  Can't.  I just know that I gradually grew out of it.  Mostly.  And it was absolutely essential that I did.  I think slowly having people's acceptance (I mainly had to go outside Christian circles to enjoy that, I can tell you) trickle into me, and my having those small life successes, helped.  Keeping jobs.  Getting a place to live. Learning to play guitar and record.  People pestering me to help them with stuff, a sure sign I was competent at something.
  On the other hand, I really think that seeing just how unfair truly judgmental people were with me, and my being accused of any number of unfair things, oddly, helped too.  They overstated their case until even I couldn't take them seriously.  I mean, when I worked at the Christian school, of course I knew that I was a Joke of God, an abomination, a Freak of Nature, an abortion of a man, a human hemorrhoid, but when someone told people I was gay and insinuated that I was therefore, a pedophile, as the two were to him perhaps somewhat synonymous, I knew for certain that I was better than that person's view, anyway.  I might have been the Beast of the Apocalypse, but I wasn't a gay pedophile.  I just wasn't, and he'd told people basically that.  That kind of thing lends perspective, I guess.

  I think I started doing more things, if the opportunity arose, and thinking of myself more in terms of someone who was doing the things, not someone who did or did not deserve to do the things, or would or would not succeed.  I just made sure I did succeed instead of predicting that I wouldn't and that it was no use.  And as I was doing various things with various people, increasingly one failure or setback was only one thing, and other stuff was going on too, so it kind of blended.  All of my eggs, increasingly, were not in the one basket.

Figuring Out Who You Are
I believe that defining an identity, and knowing who one is, is something that begins in adolescence, and in my case, was being systematically thwarted.  Piaget actually believed that the "job," developmentally speaking, of an adolescent human is to forge an identity separate from parents and culture, so as to interact with both them and it as a distinct personality, not wholly controlled or defined by them, but able to connect when beneficial to all.  I know my church lifestyle made this take not only my teens, but my twenties also.  So long as I was living at my parents at age twenty-two, and not making enough money to really succeed at looking after myself, so long as no girl was terribly clear that she liked me when she likely, in retrospect, did, so long as random church people could treat me like dirt and there were no nonChristian people treating me like a normal person, it continued.

  But when I was twenty-three, I could afford to get my own place.  I found increasingly that I was becoming someone, and that no one knew who that was, and that it didn't matter so much that they understand, or even whether that someone was good or bad, but that I be that someone.  There just wasn't anyone else around who was going to be me.

  So I guess the shame thing just gradually became less of a problem.  Not none of a problem.  But less of one.

   Good thing.  Because I think I used to live a life that strove to keep all the bad stuff away, often by not risking bad stuff in order to get good stuff.  I'd habitually not pursue (or hope for, more importantly) a whole lot of good stuff.  Wasn't safe.  Because things could go wrong, and really seemed to. I thought not hoping would make me safer.

What I Learned From The Bottom Of A Beer Bottle
The story has often been told (by me) of how one time I went for a walk at night and asked God if my life had to only suck. I mean, I told Him that I understood that it was life, after all, and it was my life, all too true, and that He was Him of course, and that pain is certainly the best teacher naturally, so it had to suck of course.  I mean, I knew all that.  But did it have to JUST suck?
  And then someone walked out of a house and smashed me in the face with a full beer bottle.  The beer bottle shattered.  Glass and beer all over me.  My face somehow got not a single scratch or cut from that.  It was seriously weird.

  And the lesson I learned from the bottom of that bottle seemed to be that I wasn't actually keeping the bad out of my life at all, by all the not trusting, not hoping, and not pursuing good.  The bad would find me, even two miles out of town in the middle of nowhere.  And yet?  I was completely fine.  Couldn't hide from the trouble, yet hadn't been hurt by it.
  Of course I was worried that if I hoped or went after good things, that I'd be "punished" for it.  God was like that, wasn't He?  Or was He?  Well, it was clear to me that I was being punished anyway.  So I started not only gratefully letting good come into my life, without fearing it, but actually going after good.  I feared some kind of blowback, but I did it anyway.  And the blowback never came.

  And I started to be more afraid of the nothing than the bad, too. I'd thought before that bad things happening would hurt me, but I came to realize that too much nothing happening was an even bigger problem.  For me, anyway, given where I live.  I thought I could live a careful, zero-sum life, no good let in, no bad let in either.  But of course, bad always comes in anyway. And the good doesn't always come in quite so easily.  I could keep the good out a lot better than I could keep the bad out.  A whole lot better.  So I simply quit trying so hard to avoid bad.  I stopped being careful for everything. I stopped trusting in fear to keep me out of danger.  Too much caution, too much fear is dangerous.  It was time to fear fear itself.  It was time, in fact, to laugh at fear, because it was dumb, and to have something to do besides it.  You can't really feel fear and any other emotion at the same time.  Fear requires 100% of your emotional focus.  So if you feel anything else too, the fear loses its grip on you. Try it.

  I spent far too many days (weeks) sitting in my room, as if if I did absolutely nothing at all, that nothing at all bad would happen to me.  Like Will Ferrell as Harold Crick in Stranger Than Fiction.  Well, depression, despair, spiritual starvation, a thirsty mind and loneliness, paranoia and self-loathing found me there.  Easily.  They came from inside, so I couldn't keep them out.  And these inner dangers were (and are) some of the very worst bad things that have ever happened to me.
  And the more I pursued and consumed and enjoyed and collaborated upon and created and celebrated and was grateful for all the good, the more I saw that no correspondingly extra large portion of bad ever came along with it.  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  The good?  We have to try harder with that. 

The Nothing Will Kill You
But that beer bottle story doesn't "explain" how awesome I am now.  (I am not awesome.  And if I'm fair, I don't suck either.  People seemed to agree with a Facebook graphic I shared that I'm an asshole alright, but that they get used to it and don't mind.  Too many people liked that graphic for my liking, when I put it on my Facebook wall.  And I got the distinct impression that me being a bit difficult is part of how they think I should be.  Part of the whole experience, so to speak.) 

   I still have a problem with the bad "nothing" stuff that wells up from within, even if I somehow mostly keep all the bad stuff from outside away.  But the more I have learned about other people, the more I have learned how the same we all are inside.  You'd think that we all look fairly similar on the outside, but inside, each person would be terribly distinct.  I'm finding that often the reverse is true.  

  I thought of this idea one time as I stood on the sidewalk at night, thinning long hair needing a trim, a single, middle-aged Plymouth Brethren man who didn't get along with his birth culture and has an uneasy relationship with his parents and their religion, talking with the wife of a friend I went to high school with.  She stood there too, thinning close-cropped hair quite at odds with her middle-aged Sikh upbringing.  But then, she didn't get along with her birth culture, and has an uneasy relationship with her parents and their religion and was married to a white guy after divorcing the arranged husband her folks had arranged for her.  Outwardly our lives were in different hemispheres, quite literally.  Inwardly, we totally "got" each other.

  And I know lesbians, atheists, pagans, Catholics (lapsed and otherwise), pastors, poets and produce clerks, and I find that if you go down deep enough inside us, we're more alike than we think.  It's the outside stuff that seems to cause most of the distance and complication.

  You know?  How we worded something, if we paid a bill, how we dress, what we're doing for a living right now, where we're living right now, indoor or outdoor "plumbing."  Stuff like that.

Disclaimers
When I went to Teacher's College, one of our profs had a "no disclaimers" rule.  It saved an awful lot of time when we did presentations.  Every time any one of us prospective teachers took our turn to present something we had to take turns presenting to everyone in the class, we'd want to do a little preamble.  "Okay, this isn't really finished.  I meant it to be a lot more... I didn't have much time and I have the flu right now, so it...This is supposed to be in colour but I didn't have the right markers..."

  "No disclaimers!" Dr. Lucille Waterson would kindly snap.  And we'd feel just how naked it was to agree to be so naked as to not be allowed to quickly "point-out-our-flaws-before-someone-else-did," to make sure everyone knew we knew, so they wouldn't think we thought we were good, and in need of getting shot down.  So they wouldn't shoot us down.  So we wouldn't be that wounded.  Pride came before a fall, and we were afraid of falling, so we always lay down and hid under things and felt as much shame as we could.  So we wouldn't fall.  Because we really thought shame and pride were opposites.  (They're not even mutually exclusive.)

  I see a whole lot of standup comedians have actually made a routine out of these things Lucille called "disclaimers," out of the self-loathing.  Maybe that's therapeutic.  Maybe if they keep saying it, they feel it less. I dunno.  Didn't really work for me.  But Louis C.K. is a huge success because of going on and one for years about being fat and old and gross.  People like when he does that.  He makes a living at it.  Kevin Smith, when interviewed about a movie, will happily talk about how fat he is for fifteen minutes at a time.  He will talk at length about the time he had an anal fissure and made, first his wife, then a doctor, look.  Because he doesn't feel unacceptably exposed talking about his anal fissure to a crowd.  

  No, but there is something that does make him feel horribly exposed.  And he  does anyway: he tries to make something he actually cares about (with him it's movies) and then he lets people choose to like that thing he's done, or hate it.  Still, when he introduces his movies or does audio commentary, he goes on and on about how much he sucks, and how bad he is at directing, and how it's really Ben Affleck and Matt Damon or whoever who made it work, to the degree that he'll admit any of them worked.  Just like when Steve Taylor and Don Miller did the commentary track on their little Blue Like Jazz movie, Don wouldn't stop making fun of and pointing out any tiny, imperceptible flaw in it.  You know, pre-emptive shame. Before anyone else did.  Very 90s.  Steve is more 80s and wanted him to quit that.

  But the difference between those guys and twenty-something me?  They do comedy sketches and shows.  They do movies with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. They do movie adaptations of their books of essays.  And I think that helps.
  Eventually, though,  I sang in front of people.  I became a teacher, who people have to listen to all day, so I'd better deliver.  Shame doesn't help either of those activities.  I think either all this helped me let go of the shame, or that all this became possible the more I let the shame go.  All I know is that in my twenties, the more I made something creative and people were kind about it, the more I hoped and then didn't die for it, the more I applied for jobs and got them, the more I looked after myself and got places to live and made mistakes and made what Jordan Peterson calls "micro-corrections" on the fly, the more things slowly re-calibrated to work better and better. Eventually the habitual disclaimers ("This book I wrote didn't work out quite how I meant it to.."  "Well, it's only a 2010 Dodge Charger, three years old now and I didn't buy it new anyway and there are some scratches on the bumper..." "Well, at the festival I sang part of the words wrong and played a wrong chord at one point..") got a bit weak.  Eventually success in some degree must be deemed to have happened.  Eventually "close enough" becomes good enough, and I don't agonize for long over the flaws.
  Eventually a man who stands up and whose actions say "Listen to me. I wrote a song and I'm going to sing it for you and I hope you like it" yet whose words before singing say "Look, this isn't really very good and I suck and shouldn't be singing this, so try not to throw things" is going to have his words ignored and his actions listened to.  And he might as well just stop saying those words and just show everyone his vulnerability so they can have the chance to be appreciative or at least kind.

For some reason I just pictured if strippers were allowed to do disclaimers before their performances.  (peeking out from behind a curtain) "Oh, hi.  I'm Lacey.  I'm going to come out and take off all of my clothes, but I feel I should warn you that I don't look very good naked. These aren't my real breasts, I have cellulite, my ankles are thick, it's very lucky the lighting is dim and flattering in here, and I have a cold and am leaking snot from my nose, which, by the way, I had done too. I'm really far too old and ugly and stupid-looking to be getting naked in front of a room full of paying customers. But, sit back and try to enjoy my show!  Not that you're going to be able to!"

Distancing One's Self From One's Own Work
One time I went up in a bar, and like I do sometimes, I sang one of my weirdest songs, written when I was at my weirdest phase of being a weird young man who wrote weird songs, and I distanced myself from the song by a disclaimer.  I said it was a weird song.  I said I'd written it a long time ago.  Stuff like that.  My tone of voice said more than the words, too.  And then I sang it.  And a woman came up to me afterward.  She was offended.  She was offended that I had tried to dismiss that song, because it spoke to her.  It wasn't just a song for weird young men.  It was, she informed me, a song for everyone.  "Because we've all been there. And we still go there from time to time," she said.  She wanted me to respect my song.  And I guess she was right.  No disclaimers before being naked.

  I am older than I used to be.  In fact, I am twice as old as I was when I hated how I looked twice as much.  It doesn't get better with age, so you have to lay off a bit, and forgive yourself for being human and for aging, and delight in compliments as they come, and value good and nice stuff.  You start remembering to appreciate sunsets.  You start utterly discounting first, your own ability to recognize and deal with how flawed you are and aren't.  And you go on from there to utterly discount everyone else's ability to recognize and deal with how flawed you are and aren't. We're so flawed we can't even be trusted not to miss our good points.  Or our bad points.  We're operating blind.
  So you start looking for good things to maybe come into your day.  The kind of good, or at least interesting, things that you can't control, predict, or order from eBay.  And that's, kind of, hope.