supermaik

OK – well I guess – I’ve told this story a thousand times.

But just to get it right. Just in case you’re interested.

You know there’s this cat, it’s black and white one, and I love this cat but it wont let me anywhere near it. Once the cat was lying under a tree in our garden, its one of its sleeping places, and it woke up and saw me, startled, like it always is when it sees me. Usually it runs off, but this time it saw that I had some food in my hand. It could smell it and it smelt good. The cat must have been seriously hungry because instead of running off it smelt the air, and kept lifting its nose in the air and all. It looked at me, stared at me, and tentatively crept forward, one step at a time, looking like it would bolt at any time. It got closer and closer. And it was within a few steps of me and I was beginning to feel so happy – I was finally going to befriend the cat – it was finally going to trust me. And just at the point where it was about to take the food from me – I inched forward – and it hissed at me and bolted.

I am the cat. It is my default, most normal state of mind to hate myself, to think that I am in some sense flawed, an irritant, and that if people get to know me too well they will hate me, be irritated by me, laugh at me and want to put me down. It’s like they’ll get the sense that I am some disgusting presence in their life, which needs to be dealt with. That’s the way it is baby. It’s the result of twenty years of being told I am bad and evil, and being teased for being fat, poor, and dirty and having an evangelical mum.

What does this amount to? It amounts to an individual who comes to believe that he has some inherent quality that draws people, things and God to hate him and despise him. I feel like I was made to be hated. As a result I am scared, I am crying and I want to die. I disgust myself. I irritate myself. I fucking hate myself. I despise myself. Its not that I think I’m inherently bad – it’s worse – I think I’m inherently irritating – that the only time I’m not irritating is when I’m in neutral – non-threatening, non-proactive and non-expressive – dead. I just have this idea of me failing time after time to be funny, to be charming, to be loveable and instead whenever I try I am just an embarrassment, an irritant, overly needy, overly demanding, ugly and irritating. Ugly.

So what? So I can’t imagine that anyone really can sense any value in my company, in who I am. I generally feel a million miles from people. The friends I have, it takes a lot of investment from them for me to get in a relationship. Very few of my relationships were formed on the basis of me being proactive about them. I am like the cat, in that I can hardly believe that each individual I encounter doesn’t in some way have some natural predilection to hate and despise me, it’s just a matter of time. I can’t conceive of having a relationship with someone – with anyone – I can only think about protecting myself. Which would be great if being on my own all the time was fun – but it isn’t. I don’t like being lonely – I hate being lonely. So I go out with people – but I go out with people who invite me out – and as a result I am not necessarily going out with people I like – and when I go out its often on their terms. But as soon as they show the slightest inclination that they don’t like me or that they are irritated by me, I dash back into my hole, and look at the four corners of my room – feeling safe – thinking hah, they cant get me now – before starting to feel blue, terribly blue, wanting to reach back out, but not being able to because I think they hate me, because I hate myself. Its only when they knock on the door and tell me to come out that I think about venturing into the world again. Until then I am really like scared and alone.

I have a glass cage over my soul – no-one can see it so they don’t think that anything’s really wrong with me – they just think I have made some strange choices – that I choose to be this weird disaffected individual – but its not the case I don’t want to be like this – they put a glass cage over me – they didn’t want me to be able to relate to people – they wanted to control me – but I wouldn’t let them and I escaped – but by the time I had escaped the cage had been completed. I need a welder to take it off me before I go crazy – I am already crazy. There are people who I think might even love me just for a second, and I’m on the inside of the cage, with my hands on the glass, wishing I could reach out and touch them, wishing I could share some warmth – but I cant. Then the people who thought that they might like me think I don’t think I like them – and I can’t do anything about it – and then they start to show a bit of fear or uncertainty around me. And in all honesty it’s the cage’s fault, but I think that its’ something inherent in me, just like the people do – and I rush back into my hole, and forget about the cage, and hate, hate myself. The cage is transparent, sometimes its’ almost invisible, and if you don’t know its there you can think its’ you.

I feel like I am a waste of physical matter – why for the life of me do I bother to keep fit or eat healthily – or even care about anything about myself – why? – when all I’m doing is preserving mediocrity, preserving this fucking waste of space – preserving all this self-hatred, prolonging the tears and the pain and suffering? I am so ugly. What is the purpose of my ugly disgusting existence? It’s not so much the physically ugliness of myself – it’s the state of mind – the ugliness that I have learned to see in myself – the ugliness that I have come to see as an unavoidable inherent feature of myself. Its so deeply ingrained in myself – and its not just a state of mind – well it is – but a state of mind isn’t something you can choose – like a brand of cereal from the shelves – it’s a form of wiring – that hundreds of hands have had a role in assembling in me. Its like a motherboard or a chip or a programme in a computer. And I feel like a computer which has got the wrong programme in it. And just like a computer I cant fucking do anything to rewire myself – I can only sit there and simply experience my wiring.

How do I get the cage off?

I can’t quite understand or completely explain how much I hate myself or my predicament or what has been done to me.

I feel like I am missing some vital part that would allow me to properly relate to people.

I am not the kind of person who thinks of doing something with other people.

I never think of doing anything with other people and yet I feel horribly lonely at the same time.

My natural instinct is to simply exist and take care of myself.

I feel so upset.

Everyone is having a good time – everyone is getting on and having a laugh – and only I am sitting here worrying – thinking that people would rather I wasn’t around – thinking that people are irritated by me – thinking that people don’t want to know me. I feel so shit. I feel so unwanted. I feel like people are laughing at me.

I feel like this because of the way I have been treated by people in the past, whereby, people would laugh at me, people would shy away from me, people would gang up on me and people would leave me alone. My reaction to all this has been to shy away from people, to suspect that they don’t like me. I am incredibly sensitive. If I get the slightest sense that people don’t like me, or have found something that I have done not to their taste, then I immediately run and hide away, and don’t go anywhere near them, because I don’t want them to react, I don’t want them to come out and hurt me.

For this reason, I have a complete inability to think of doing things with people, because I by organising things, by increasing my contact with people, I am increasing the number of opportunities for people to find out how shit I am and then to react by hurting me. It’s a wonder that I haven’t been abused more.

I am so upset. The only thing I can do to stop thinking like this is to believe that there is nothing inherently wrong with whom I am.

How do I overcome this?
How can I be any different?
What would I feel?
What would it look like?

I am thinking of doing therapy myself.

One of my biggest problems in life is that I quite often feel anxious and sad for no reason, and it stops me from talking, which in effect puts up huge barriers between me and everyone else. I also find it really difficult to engage in chatting and small talk.

However, today, I had what came close to an incredibly intense albeit brief therapeutic encounter, and all of a sudden I felt like rays of sun enter my soul. I imagined that feeling the way I did, and maybe the way I do, that put in the same social situations I could be so much different. I am wondering, does therapy, when it works, help lift this kind of anxiety? Does it change your general sense of interest in the world, does it help you see more wonder in the world, and release you to feel a greater desire to share those experiences with others, and to chat and to engage in small talk?

Any experiences and replies would be welcome!