OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

The Possibility of the Extinction of Self-Hatred

January 21st, 2009

A discussion last week, on Jenny’s blog, and the unreliable narrator puts out that whatever the reasons were that she started blogging, her blog has become a place to practice ending self-hatred. Which resonates. More, even than the journals in which I am endlessly trying to sort out what exactly I think, the practice of baring and sharing and seeking truth is a defiance of self-hatred. Uncomfortably, though, I ask myself what would be left without the self-hatred? It has been a guide, a constant companion, a pyrrhic defense, that nothing anyone else can do can penetrate as deeply, wound as painfully. Would I have to let go of the mortification of waking and realizing talked too much the night before and how probably every person I love is about to become just sick of me and leave me?

That dread on waking: I talked too much last night, carried away, excitement at the conversation drowning out sensitivity, I didn’t listen well enough, bulled through the china shop, when will I ever learn? You would think that the practice of three pages every morning, the faith that I will get to chase down the loose threads, the knowledge of blankness to fill, waiting for me, would make me a better listener, only I fear it makes me like the worst sort of dentist, soliloquizing all day to those hapless persons whose mouth my hands happen to be in, until I think that that is how conversation is supposed to be. I ache, forgive me, what must you think of me?

In a conversation, Jenny asks how I find it in me to write when the world seems full of aspiring writers, and I answer, I try not to be thoughtless, but I cannot afford to think of them, the other writers. Deeper though. It does seem almost an act of unbearable arrogance to hit the publish button, to assert that my thoughts somehow matter, it’s just that I’m sick of self-effacement, it feels like a false virtue, one I cannot bear for another second. I mentioned to two of my favorite Twitter folk that I’d decided to stop auto-tweeting when I publish a blog entry and they both protested, no, they depend on those tweets, don’t see it as shameless self-promotion, or maybe don’t think there’s anything wrong with self-promotion.

The oddly liberating thought of the week has been that it is none of my business what other people think of me. This is the answer that all thought roads seem to lead to. That it is beyond my control. I could remind them of someone who picked on them in childhood, of a bad experience somewhere else, they could be having a bad day. It is radically far from a sort of script for how to behave, a motherly reminder, “You must share toys or other children will not like you” or “You must take turns or nobody will want to play with you.” It seems so absurd, we are engineered as social beings to seek one another’s approval, it’s how we are socialized and learn to be productive parts of groups. Give up bothering myself about what other people think of me! I cannot make anyone like me! Which doesn’t lead as I thought, to therefore I don’t need to take turns or share but to: Therefore I must be the person I like.

Jenny and I talk about being scrupulous, not allowing criticism of others, unkind words and judgements, to become the currency of our friendship, because to do so would make our own practicings at ending self-hatred impossible. We understand too deeply, each of us, the shared fear that others are judging us, and to allow that it is none of our business what other people think of us, is to be given the courage to listen to our inner voices. And the gift I find in the conversations around this, is to have a friendship where I don’t hold back and feel safe. Where I can say totally the wrong thing and she will tell me, gently, and I will get to apologize, where we have experience forgiving each other.

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For weeks, it seems now, ideas and journal entries and the soap opera in my head and the fiction I pick up, all circle around the old themes,braided together, (the themes that make me wonder if inside my head I will be fifteen forever and what implications that will hold in the near future when there is an honest-to-God chronologically fifteen year old person living in the house,) but themes of how one breaches loneliness, and celebrates its abeyance without letting down one’s guard so that its inevitable return isn’t catastrophic, and about balancing honesty and sensitivity, about how far one shares oneself, and what one holds back.

Nicole Krauss’ Man Walks Into a Room, starts with a plaintive note of life-long loneliness, that the rush of falling in love promises to take away, so that the return of loneliness is only more bitter. Then May Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing replies, as a book will, gently, yes, we love ferociously, studying the beloved as if they were the map to the world, and yet… Love is not an answer to loneliness, if there is an answer to loneliness, it is that loneliness is the poverty of self, solitude the richness of self. And it’s none of my business what other people think of me.

I get excited, underlining and copying passages into my journal, realizing how this calls up the best dream I ever experienced, at fifteen, where I was pursuing through this crowded train station the object of my most desperate first crush (gratitude twenty years later, that this object was gentle and respectful, and never took advantage nor made me feel stupid for this impossible crush, how does one get to be that lucky?) and upon finding him, in this dream, he with that gentleness, said, no, really, you’re searching for yourself.

This from the Quran, quoted in a Baha’i prayer for marriage “He hath let loose the two seas, that they meet each other: Between them is a barrier which they overpass not.” I have struggled with the idea of that barrier, when all that I can remember ever having wanted is to know and be known. It seems lonely to think that the barrier somehow prevents it, and it is trying to breach the barrier that I do keep looking for better words. I try applying here, “But it’s none of my business what other people think of me” and that barrier suddenly strikes me as a safety zone. In the Twilight books there’s the vampire who can read the thoughts of everyone around him except for the girl he immediately falls in love with, and in Charlaine Harris’s Dead Until Dark books, the mind-reading girl cannot stand dating men because she reads their thoughts, and then meets the vampire whose mind remains closed to her, and it’s such a relief that she falls in love with him. Too much thinking on how people work and I suddenly find it unbearable even the small degree of transparency, the insecurities and pettinesses revealed, I can imagine no greater horror than the Psychic X-Ray Goggles. Is the barrier between selves a safety?

May Sarton makes reference to “the experiential fact that a writer not only feels but watches himself feeling” and this feels familiar, the feeling of vertiginous duplicitousness, the second-guessing my own sincerity because I observe myself, I narrate. The transparency of my own self?

I think of Raven’s observation that some people, compelling and charismatic people, you only ever get to know to a certain degree because they are so busy performing, the performance keeps you from ever seeing their real feelings, hearing their real thoughts. I get fearful sometimes, about the blog-as-performance, that it should stand as a barrier between myself and others rather than a bridge connecting two selves, a truth-seeking.

That fracturing, the crack between the self experiencing, the self performing for itself, and the self observing, seems like a place where the self-hatred slips in. And maybe that’s why the blogging can be a place for practicing the extinction of self-hatred? That I let go of performing, of being so anxiously concerned about what you think of me, of holding back and holding back, and instead try for truth-seeking doesn’t make the two selves one again, but creates a bridge between them both, a bridge I extend outward.

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