For years I have battled with conflicting ideas if myself, out of which often the inevitable path of seemingly least resistant (from alcoholism to listening to the same old albums) becomes the only solution I can.
I am a lonely person, I only have the nagging concerns of my parents to guilt me into not taking impulsive thoughts too far. I’ve never really connected to anyone, not properly. Never has my world been reduced to the beauty of one Other.
I really struggle with self help culture when I add an estranged friend on Facebook who id thought had come through their alcoholism, only to see (from their posts) that the hell has only grown
I really struggle with self help culture when I found out, a year late, that somebody I went to college with, an alcoholic with more than alcohol as his problems, but whom found “god’, nonetheless killed himself last year.
I’ve grown up in a traumatised town. If I said that out loud in my home town, it wouldn’t go down well. But it is so. And this means that the common response to trauma is thick skins and tough love.
To my best ability I have never been able to do this. I love my home town, but I still feel like I’m an alien lost with my assumptions about how life is supposed to be like.
Self help can often hurt, without any positives.
Self.help is only positive. YOU CAN change.
But for many, there is a flip side to this coin, that blames them for their suffering, and tells them they are to all intents and purposes bad people for not “being better’.
I’ve spent my writing, drawing, doing whatever to try to express a sole desire to get out whatever I am in.
I have always felt like I am either trapped in something, or that something is encroaching.
If I had learnt to positively identify with myself for longer than a few lovely months in my 20th year, I would have been able to assert a visual opposite to these feelings, and go somewhere, be something somewhere else.
I’d have never called this self hate in my 20s. But it certainly was, and still is.
I’m here again, sat in a pub on a Saturday. To some it seems like a choice, but after years of wanting to change this I still can’t get out of the situation where all I can hope for is to go somewhere with the hope of stumbling on an encounter that changes the arrangement of the particles that have kept me locked up for so long.
Self hatred abounds, every sentence, every explanation, every stance,.every posture comes with a shower of critics all waiting to be manifested by the random troll who agrees with them.
“I am trying” I say. Or am I saying this to appease those specific inner critics?
But trying must surely have concrete results. Trying to ignore that tendency to dwell with the voices for another minute, and just do. Get up and say hi to that person.
But you get it wrong. Even when they are sympathetic, and recognise your discomfort with kindness, although this does nothing to alleviate the diminishment of you in public.
You walk away and ever mirror sees a bin bag slowly trying to remove itself from the scene.
Drinking increases the belly..I see it, and feel self hate. And know that the first to comment will send me spiralling.
Self hate does not allow you to have a body. The best way to not have a body is to make your body have nothing that can be scrutinised.
What was your favorite subject in school?
I lost all warmth for life in my two final years due to eating and I obsessive disorders, so anything I say from those years is false.
Before than, I was still under the influence of warn dreams. My favourite classes were classes I. which people I had a crush on were present.
Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).
I’ll speak about the the most expensive item I have now, but wasn’t as expensive as my Mac when I bought it.
I bought a maple finish Rickenbacker 330 guitar when I was 18 in 2002. I was on the verge of being classified anorexic and bought this through money I got in a measly pot washing job, which I saved up from, because I had no social life to spend money on.
There is a weird link between the fetishism of such objects and the desexualisation that occurs when anorexic. But all I can say is that when it came to my 20s and begining song writing, I longed for a Fender Telecaster.
But I couldn’t give up this guitar because it is so nice
I can finally unveil the books and collaborate album that have been made to mark my upcoming exhibition in January of 2026.
For those people who bought them as perks by contributing to my crowdfunder, I will be delivering/sending them asap. But I’m planning to make the rest available on the opening of the exhibition!
Walking from St Pancras to Kings Cross, I’m eager not to keep John waiting in the train station bar, but also to not appear out of the sync with the pace of London. There is also an anxiety about ‘getting it right’, not missing another sailing ship.
Coming to London always feels like touching base. I can’t put my finger on it, it’s not quite a recharge, maybe more like having your thumb on the start button on of another stopwatch, as if each ‘last chance’ was a fresh stopwatch, only for each one to be smashed against a wall at an high point of failure, like all those phones you literally did that to.
It’s as if London is always a starting point, out of which arises the same old impetus to do that thing that’s always been on the precipice of cognition.
Extortionate drink prices aren’t really that more unbelievable than anywhere else in the country, and you’ve mentally prepared for it here. London remains instantly recognisable even as it continuously changes; the many skins of gentrification that you see, you have already seen everywhere else, especially in the overly proud North. What is different is that last time was before the burn-outs, a state of being than neither myself, or potentially an entire generation who expected something different to ‘this’, can regain.
Tube and Overground to New Cross Gate
I begin to question my idea to travel down to New Cross as the train is far more crowded than anything myself or John are used to these days, and we wonder if this is the busiest train we’ve ever been on, as two delivery cyclists board into spaceless space, something that was probably novel even in London last time I spent time here.
Opposing thoughts cross my mind upon seeing miserable Friday faces cramped together as they head south of the river. I recognise that despite this city’s vastly superior transport system to the rest of the country, they are also sucked of joy by the same mechanisms as the rest of us (probably more so) and lack the liberation that you’d think such transport could afford them. Yet I equally feel both guilt and envy for not being a ‘Londoner’ – this heroic breed of human.
New Cross will admittedly always now be a ritualistic pilgrimage I feel driven to make once I’ve been absorbed into the belly of the city, and if I’m with a Northern friend I will drag them here. A part of me was made here, and in a brief 3 months another part was lost here. I’m still searching for it, as silly as I know this sounds.
New Cross
The first recognisable site as we approach New Cross is the large Sainsbury’s that projects its orange glow into the urban night sky. Strong memories cling to such inglorious spaces, perhaps because nothing else stakes any claims to them.
As we climb the steps to the wooden walkways, I’m reminded that there’s a ‘look’ to certain older architecture in South London that feels intrinsically ‘south of the river’, chalk-like, mimicking the south downs and the white cliffs. Yet memory has shrunken this place like long-term anxiety has shrunken my lung capacity, because I have totally forgotten how expansive this maze of a walkway is.
John suggests going to a pub that I’ve never heard of, which turns out to be a bland makeover of the previously boozy ‘Hobgoblin’ where I recall New Cross undergrads making the dance music of my childhood fashionable again, as New Cross students always do. Yet no transcendence, no convergence was ever personally achieved down here, a pattern that would continue through my 30s.
Yet apart from this makeover, New Cross looks like it hasn’t really changed one bit. No posh makeover (not really), and all that seems to have vanished is the internet cafes that once provided a necessary function. It looks like my default 2012 picture of the place, unlike Manchester which has altered beyond recognition to my default memory of it.
The Marquis of Granby equally feels cut loose from the mass nationwide gentrification of our souls. Somehow the kids down here, although donning fashions from previous eras, do not seem to reify and cgi the hell out it like everywhere else, and still seem to mix with tutors in and out the pub. It’s always easy to romanticise on a flying visit, but perhaps I’m seeing what I want to see as a prompt to start myself up again
Saturday Morning: Lewisham
I try to employ a ‘military mindset’ to evade the nauseating limbo of this hangover, and especially the embarrasment. The rumbling sound from the close proximity of trains, sometimes I could smell it as the trams rumbled by in Sheffield, but it now feels so exotic, from a long-lost pathway.
I head out onto the street with haste, leaving John to catch up, and I am spooked by the friendliness of the shopkeeper as I buy the necessary bottle of Lucozade, as if the childhood magic trick will finally work. But nothing is working at the moment: last time I was down here the hangover was part of the process of a lifestyle I still had faith in leaving behind, but now I am haunted by the prospect that this is permanent.
We walk through Lewisham centre, noticing the rare point of exposure of one of London’s many hidden rivers now condemned to exist like concealed sewage systems. Above us is something resembling a citadel made up of the kind of architecture that seems like it gleefully wants to double down on the flattening process done to life by smart tech. This kind of architecture would have once sparked intense debate between myself and John when the affects of smart tech and gentrification still possessed a element of novelty to them, but now the conversation seems reliant on what, between us, are basically dead sentences.
Once again I have fallen victim to false memory, miss-measuring the stretch between New Cross and Lewisham, perhaps to my younger lung capacity and tolerance for urban walking. I am worried I have messed up the gallery trip we came here for, and as we pass by the places in which we drank too much the night before, I worry that my tendency to try to rekindle a past moment has made me lose sight of the present.
As we pass by Goldsmiths College I recall how a receptionist gave me pennies for an incredibly necessary phone call when I’d financially and mentally reached rock bottom. This perhaps make me feel more embarrassed about this hangover, and I daren’t ask to stop for another Lucozade when we are already running late. We head straight for the next train to London Bridge.
Green Park to Embankment
After we visit the gallery we aim to find the river, what else would you walk towards? But I feel nothing as we walk through this area of London, it means nothing to me. The Mall, the galleries, it all feels pertaining to something I am almost aggressively indifferent to, especially when hungover with little tolerance for meaningless avenues of pomp.
Yet I cannot help but make a potentially inappropriate joke upon seeing the flags outside the Italian embassy, in that in the UK you could easily just think it was a pizza restaurant. But the joke is really on me, or on us: a time where this country had an ability to laugh at others and take others for granted has long passed, and nothing reassuring is guaranteed now as we solemnly cling onto warm meals provided to us by other countries.
My bones are heavier, everything is heavier. I recall that catalytic year of 2011. Even I was here! Sat on the plinth upon which Nelson’s Column stands, surrounded by Red Flags, at a fiery anti Austerity March. Myself and John respond with surprise as to why people were so angry back then, compared to how things are now. But that’s just it: we had every right to demand better back then, but after 15 years of austerity it’s not just me, but everyone who lacks that lung capacity to demand such a thing. I cannot imagine hauling my heavier bones onto this plinth now.
The waste of hangovers, it’s bothering me so much as I try to stare into the river and retrieve something, some sense of purpose, something to match the earnest aims of the ‘quiet activism’ myself and John are now collaborating on. Countless immigrant workers riding ‘vejazzeled’ rickshaws cycle past us, pumping the music of Abba and Dua Lipa onto the road. I shy away in embarrassment for them, and in shame for how I can’t pertain to the mantra of my home town to ‘toughen up’ and take whatever job you have to. So much shame clings to me as I follow this river.
Yet I came here with acorns from an unusually fertile oak tree down the road from where I’m from, whilst John collected some conkers from his home city of Leeds. Planting them is little about whether they will grow or not, it’s entirely about the rebirth of something; something the starts at the impulse to create despite the circumstances and reaches towards the impulse to fight for what you believe in despite the circumstances. Planting these seeds is meaningful because of its seeming futility, and I need to hold this thought close as we walk and walk slowly towards our exit out of the city.
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
People think I ‘enjoy’ being an artist
If I could escape this identity and have a different kind of life with things like company, family, I would
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 