Is this the road to Emmaus?
Disordered fragments of self-hatred, by Blair Hunwick
Say not the struggle nought availeth...
"I know that in the past I have felt that I hated myself. 'In the past' ? It still happens. Those occasions when all you can do, apparently, is make mistakes, hurt people you love, make a fool of yourself, etc. Somehow these 'little' things commingle and you feel like nothing'll turn out right, and all that anger and dark feeling is turned on yourself. That's a thin description of what it feels like, anyway. For me, feeling I like and dislike myself seems to come and go; I can't explain why. I wish I could, but it's just a mystery." (My diary, January 5th 1997).
Your lack of self-esteem may be intuited by others who, unwittingly or not, may sometimes mirror it back to you. Are you being undervalued or patronised, or is what hurts, if only in part, that you're seeing your self-oppression externalised? If this is so, it may show you, or remind you of, your self- hatred.
"Don't hide, / don't run, / but rather / discover in the midst of fragmentation / a new way forward..." (Toyohiko Kagawa in Peter Millar's Iona Prayer Book). (Many times have I hidden and run, but you cannot escape your own mind). You may discover more than one way forward, as I have. In writing, confiding just sometimes in friends and family, and counselling, I try to move on or to bear my pain where I am. I think of John Polkinghorne quoting John Hick saying that "what Christian thought must always reject is 'the idea of finally wasted suffering and goodness'" (Science and Providence, p.63). I cannot always reject this, despite insisting to myself that the labour and the wounds are not in vain. But what way to wholeness is there, other than through our brokenness? It will be a wounded wholeness, with scars and shattermarks still visible, but these are marks of resurrection life. Perhaps reaching Emmaus will mean arriving at this wholeness; a wholeness in which our eyes will be opened and we will look back, and see and know our stories differently. I cannot know your wounds, nor your potential ways forward to some kind of wholeness, but I pray for all who have depression and hate themselves.
We are called to forget ourselves, take up our cross daily and follow Jesus, and to lose our lives to save them (see Luke 9:23-24). This surely entails forgetting ourselves in the context of knowing God's grace, and knowing ourselves radically accepted. With this knowing we may come to be liberated from the pain that imprisons us in ourselves, and from depending on others for validation. Forgetting ourselves is one side of a paradox, for we are also called to be wholly aware of ourselves as well as all around us, as Anthony de Mello advocates in Awareness. Be aware that I'm only projecting myself forward into what living this paradox might be like; but it must involve severalfold attention, to all in our mental and material worlds. It cannot involve self- forgetting or self-denial in the sense of considering yourself worthless, or denying your needs, or smothering your inner cry. These express violence to self. We are called to forget ourselves, take up our cross daily and follow Jesus, and to lose our lives to save them (see Luke 9:23-24). This surely entails forgetting ourselves in the context of knowing God's grace, and knowing ourselves radically accepted. With this knowing we may come to be liberated from the pain that imprisons us in ourselves, and from depending on others for validation. Forgetting ourselves is one side of a paradox, for we are also called to be wholly aware of ourselves as well as all around us, as Anthony de Mello advocates in Awareness. Be aware that I'm only projecting myself forward into what living this paradox might be like; but it must involve severalfold attention, to all in our mental and material worlds. It cannot involve self-forgetting or self-denial in the sense of considering yourself worthless, or denying your needs, or smothering your inner cry. These express violence to self.
As you can perceive, self-hatred involves a lot of anger. When you taste some of this, acceptance comes to seem impossible, as does reconciliation to your anger or its origins. Remember that Jesus taught swift reconciliation of the angry, but also that he expressed his anger (against the money-changers in the temple, and the Pharisees). Perhaps, then, we are called to express ours, which might mean creating a setting in which to explode. I have no idea what this might mean; I haven't done it. But there's another side to anger in this context. Seeing and knowing the ravages and corrosion done by self-hatred, we may find ourselves angry at self-hatred itself. This may begin or spur our liberation from it.
When your mind becomes your cell... hurling yourself against its walls... fully laden with tangled writhing compacted anger and inward-turned violence - sometimes submerged and often emerging, pushing, struggling for a way out... or engulfed, flooded by numbness, darkness... but then the ebb begins...
Acceptance is an open kind of knowing. (It may be welcoming or eagerly receptive, but not toward feelings like these.) It is one where you don't try, don't probe or investigate, but simply allow yourself to perceive without comment. You don't slam the door on those perceptions. Continuing to feel numb, unable to become angry or to cry, I found myself helped to acceptance by confiding that I couldn't find the releases I wanted. Simply saying this stilled the storm (if only for a while) and enabled me to stop weighing myself down. In this way, acceptance itself became a release.
"Feel more at peace now than earlier - should have written when I actually felt violently, destructively angry with myself. Thinking, at bottom, I hate you, you're ugly, unmanly, useless socially, pathetically unassertive, you weren't even organised enough to get a relatively short essay in completed on time, you hadn't prepared well for that seminar on Tennyson's 'Maud', aaaaaargh !" (My journal, May 12th 1999).
In our self-hatred we may put up facades, or stretch a smile over an abyss of pain. Our facades may be brittle, however well wrought, yet we cling to and reinforce them. Thus hidden, we may have little genuine contact with others. We may be ambivalent about our facades: we want to keep them up yet more deeply yearn to smash them, and have a commensurately deep fear of so doing.
What of men who hate themselves? Do we expect only women to be emotionally articulate? Do we expect men to be helpers and not helped, or to be 'strong' and silent? Are men ambivalent about any such feelings, preferring to joke around them, or unsure what to do with them? Is it easier for women to admit their self-hatred? Is it easier for women to seek hugs or cuddles from others when comfort beyond words is needed? Perhaps I have posed most of these as simple rhetorical questions, when reality is more complex: what do you think?
"How to feel anything? Why a numb void? Why can't I cry or even get at all emotional? I'm not even that tense. Why o God do you seem absent? Is this the road to Emmaus - walking, no, trudging with weighted limbs and you beside me, me kept from knowing, from recognising? Do I just say that because I want to think you're here, want to believe even now?" (My journal, January 24th 2000).