5. My insecurity is my security blanket

I don’t wanna make this too long, I will try to keep this brief. It’s also not a pity party, I’m just getting to know myself better and “typing out loud.”

 

TL;DR- I hate myself. What are some ways to feel better about yourself when you hate 98% of the things about you?

 

I talked to somebody yesterday, somebody who will likely read this, so- hey there!… Anyway the conversation we had yesterday has had me in my head. I feel like most of the goals I’m trying to achieve are so close that I can reach out and touch them. The one thing I think that’s going to take forever, (if this is even something that I can change or fix), is how much I hate myself. I could make it my fucking job. I generally don’t feel good about myself, almost ever.

Getting to the root of that, the old cliché of “my parents didn’t love me enough”… Well, that’s actually true. They weren’t around, and when they were they weren’t present, they couldn’t have been any more disinterested in us as their children, leading me to feel inadequate, and really just never good enough. I would go to my friends houses and see my friends parents interacting with my friends and I remember feeling jealous and I would daydream about what that’d be like. My friends parents would ask them how was school and what they did during the day, they had pictures of them on their walls, they made us snacks and put on movies for us and talked to us. My parents never really did that. In my dad‘s case it was because he was working a lot, my mom‘s case is that… I don’t know, she was watching General Hospital and reading on the couch all day. She couldn’t be bothered with her offspring I guess? Contributing to these feelings of worthlessness, is the fact that they knowingly put me into sexually abusive scenarios with a number of male relatives.

Outside of the home I was bullied mercilessly for a majority of my school years. Grades one through seven, my classmates never failed to point out every single flaw about me. I was fat, ugly, smelly, weird, stupid, and everything else. I started developing early so I developed really bad acne in fourth grade. I also was accused of stuffing my bra in fourth and fifth which made me mortified and so self conscious. It got to the point where I was wearing clothes that were too small for me under my regular clothes attempt to conceal the fact that I had grown boobs overnight.

All of this has been contributing to the way I feel about myself my whole life.

This man called me beautiful yesterday and it felt so good to hear but when I turned my rearview mirror, I am looking at puffy eyes, terrible complexion, giant ass pores, a weird shaped chin a crooked mouth, uneven eyes, and a strange shaped head. My nails, I painted them a week ago and they are chipping off. I’m about 30 pounds heavier than I usually am, and it shows in my face, which looks perpetually bitchy. But despite all this extra weight I’ve gained, I still have no fucking ass! I look dumb when I smile and I’m getting wrinkles. I look…. Idk, warped.

I’m not entirely sure what he even means when he called me beautiful. I am not sure why he thinks that or what he’s seeing and I’m not going to ask because I kind of don’t want to know but it’s not the same face and body that I see, and that’s fine

So I kept looking at my stupid face trying to find it and was like, okay- I like my eye color. I like my nose. Well I don’t like it but I don’t hate it. Then was like “okay, I think I say funny things sometimes, so there’s that”. I think that I really do care about people more so than others do, and that’s something I’ve been realizing in recent years. People telling me I should hate certain people, but I don’t. My mom probably does this more than anything. She thinks I should hate my exes, or other shitty people, and almost gets mad when I don’t. People do wrong shit because they’re people, and sometimes I’m on the receiving end of that bad shit. It doesn’t mean I like the bad shit, it doesn’t mean I want these people to die, but that usually is where my mom goes… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve Heard her wish death on people. I don’t. So… “Doesn’t wish death on people” is among one of my good qualities, how bad is that? Oh, I don’t really feel like I have anything.

I don’t really know how to get comfortable with myself. I think I’m not going to find myself to be attractive or worth a damn, and it’s weird because I know other people do. I know that people love me and care about me, but I don’t really feel that way about myself so it’s kind of almost like when a friend tells you about an interest that you don’t give a shit about and is like “check out this new pop country album!” Or something,  And you’re like, happy that they like it, because it makes them happy, but you don’t get what the fuss is about. That’s kind of like what it feels like. Except when that thing that they are interested in is yourself, you kind of have to live with that. You have to live with this person that you can’t stand because that person is you and that doesn’t go away.

So how do you go about getting around this? If you go to an art exhibit and you look at an ugly painting, yes “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” blah blah blah, but let’s say somebody shows you a painting that you think is hideous. Then they tell you “you should think this paining is beautiful“… How do you do that? And what I noticed was that the second I started to think about some thing I liked about myself, I immediately felt really guilty for it or something. Maybe it wasn’t guilt. It felt a little like guilt but maybe it was like I was pretty disappointed. Like OK I like my eyecolor… But I’m sure one day I won’t like my eyecolor anymore and that’s going to be really disappointing That I won’t be able to say I have that one thing anymore that I like. So I’m already disliking my eyecolor. Maybe it’s like a fear of feeling good about myself because I know somebody’s probably going to knock me down and it’s going to hurt me more because finally starting to feel good.

Yesterday, this person I talked to told me I was listening to a 12-year-old girl because of remembering what somebody said to me in sixth grade. This girl with a bitch but she was gorgeous, so I felt like she had every right to call me ugly and fat and weird looking when she did. And to harp on it the way she did. It’s not so much that I’m holding on to what she said but that it was true at the time so would make it not true now?
I reflected on a number of relationships I’ve had over the years and the things they would say to me.

One guy used to tell me I would be so much hotter if I would lose like 15 or 20 pounds. Another one sometime later used to tell me how weird my teeth were, and they were at the time, but I have new teeth now and that’s another story that will come later, but he would also comment on the shape of my head and tell me I look like a pencil, whatever that meant. One time he got drunk and just completely picked me apart for the shape of my head while laughing hysterically. Like he found it to be genuinely funny. Another guy was always telling me I had a weird neck. The one after him was always telling me I needed to lose weight in order to be hot and that I needed a boob job and that he would pay for it because that was holding me back from being hot as well. He also used to tell me my teeth were weird and not to smile in pictures. So if we took a picture together and I would smile he would very aggressively tell me to stop smiling because I looked weird. Eventually he hit me so hard one time that my head hit the counter in his kitchen and chipped one of my teeth, and when they were drilling to try to fix it, they drilled into another tooth, and I asked them about braces or Invisalign and instead they just got me some crowns to even my teeth out, so I have a new smile but I’m still not thrilled with that either. That guy is dead now by the way. I also once dated a man who is 30 years older than me who used to be an eye doctor, and I used to think I had a nice eyes until him. He picked apart my eyes and my weight and everything about me. Everything from my personality to my sense of humor, my interests, my friends, my family, my car, my house, my upbringing, my clothes, my hair, the way I talked, the things I would say, how I would say things, my parenting style, literally everything.

The one after him basically did the same thing. He hated everything about me.

So literally my entire life I’ve been getting told that I am this or that or whatever and continuously being made to feel like shit. I’m not trying to be your victim me or anything, I’m just trying to get to know myself and I don’t really know how to go about changing this. You can’t force somebody to like the way something is or like the way it looks. So I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to feel good about myself and how to let myself feel good. Don’t get me wrong, I feel good a lot of times. Like I have days where I’m happy and shit like that I have days where I’m enjoying somebody’s company or feeling good watching TV or listening to the radio or doing something fun. I’m not like a mopey depressed lump of shit, I just don’t feel good about myself. I don’t feel good about the person that I am. I don’t feel good about the things I’ve done, mistakes I’ve made, how I look or feel…

I do feel proud of myself for the things I’m doing right now. I feel really good about that so I guess that’s a start, but I don’t know where to go from there.

I’m low key reluctant to change this. I feel like the guilt is like, an extension of who I am, like a limb. And the rest? Feeling good, liking myself, feeling confident- when someone says something that takes that away, it’ll suck a billion times more than if I didn’t feel that in the first place. If someone calls me fat or ugly right now I’m like “yea I know, what’s your point?”

I don’t know if that makes sense. But I’m comfortable hating myself.  It’s familiar.

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