TKO Creations

“See how my knuckles are bruised?  That’s because every time I wake up in the morning, I punch that asshole in the bathroom mirror.”

The self-jab works on two levels; one because my knuckles actually are a bit discolored when compared to the rest of my hand (naturally, for the record), and two because there’s a part of me where it’s a very accurate sentiment.

It’s something I’ve had to come to terms with over the decades; that there is a part of me that will never be content or satisfied with anything I accomplish.  To that part of me, I will always be an unmitigated failure.  If by some miracle I were to win the most prestigious prizes in all of literature and have widespread worldwide acclaim, that self-loathing part of myself would scoff for not having accomplished it sooner.

It’s not quite the same drive that pushes motivated people to ever greater heights.  This is a destructive self-hatred that seeks to tear myself down.  It’s not that fear of failure that serves as a motivator for some people.  It’s an expectation of failure that can make preparing for a project a million times tougher, and attempts to be a suffocating blanket on anything I finish.

It’s not even a professional self-loathing either.  It creeps into my social interactions too.  Someone wants to talk to me?  Oh dear, what did I do?  Someone thinks I’m interesting?  Oh, that’s just because they don’t know “the real me” yet.

It blames me for “entertaining” my mother’s emotional manipulation and “encouraging” her to embrace the role of perpetual victim.  It sneers at me for my father’s physical abuse, telling me if I hadn’t been such a lazy fuck-up as a child that I would have never been beaten, and that he never really beat me up that bad anyway.

It’s been such a constant presence since I was still a preteen that it feels normal to me.  I’m not sure I would even be me without that self-hating shitheel hovering in my thoughts.

I’m loathe to call it depression, because it hasn’t actually stopped me from doing anything I’ve set out to do.  But it’s not the whispers of undefined “doubters” that inspires me to what I allegedly can’t, either.  It’s both less than that, and more.

How do I handle it?  I guess I don’t really.  It’s a malice that demands to be heard, even as it is powerless at the end of the day.  So I let it say its piece to my headspace, even if it might slow me down initially.  It can be a real fight.

But it’s not a fight I’ve lost yet.

This entry was posted on June 17, 2019 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Grumblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.