At some point I’d like to talk about the link between self-hatred and the rise of the far right. I am convinced that one informs the other, that facististic desires are a rejection of the vibrancy of life because you feel so horrible about yourself but can’t admit to it. And that this has a crucial class dimension to it, in that self-hatred is what happens when your representative class power is destroyed. But this observation feels too late, too futile; I’m sorry to sound pessimistic, but it feels like the horse has already bolted
I am now in the position of no longer feeling like a societal shift is on the horizon, and instead all I have is my life.
But I am dominated by self-dislike. I wish I wasn’t but it’s like a virus that you can’t shake. Virtually, I imagine the day in hand, the places I’ll go, the people I may meet, but I walk into these spaces and am ambushed by self-critical observations that prevent me from being anything but the person I was yesterday, the day before, and every day since I had was handed the freedom to make my own decisions.
I go sit in a cafe, where people know my face, yet leave without ever uttering anything more than my usual coffee order. I get up to leave, fending off the shame of the imagined gaze of others trying to understand the motives of ‘this wierdo’ who never gets to know people.
I think about going home. But I don’t, I go to a pub, and drink until it’s softened me up enough not to care if I’m looking like a wierdo.
By this point I’m in a pub where I have nothing in common with anyone. Earlier in the evening I told myself to stand up straight as I walk past confident and fashionable gangs of people nearly 20 years younger than me, unable to shirk the feeling the I am a object of ridicule, a person who has just got life ‘so wrong’, and in a world like ours, must be held up as an image of somebody deserving of condemnation.
Self-hatred fuels loneliness and loneliness fuels self-hatred, to the day when the lifelessness of life becomes simply intolerable.
John B Ledger 