The Great Gremlin of Self-Loathing

Amongst my gremlins lies a giant of a creature, tenuously chained to a wall, pretending to be asleep but watching me through half-shut eyes. He -- although sometimes he is a she, depending on the occasion -- waits for his moment when I am weak, when I'm off my meds (still working through that change of doctor right now), when I'm exhausted and facing months of continued exhaustion. Then, he rises, an enormous shadow growing ever more corporeal with webbed wings spreading up and out. He fills every dark crevice of my body, clawing through its borders and ripping off my skin. Like a demon, he possesses me.

I don't remember when this gremlin hatched, but I have an idea. He is only slightly younger than myself, not quite a twin, but close. I suppose no one ever really knows what they are getting into when they become a parent, but I do know that the big secret out there is that some people regret it. The anti-choice people like the trope that women will regret an abortion, but I think some people regret becoming parents. They like the idea, and all, but when the baby shows up, and dirties diapers and cries and ceases to be cute because she is becoming a person with a will of their own -- well, who bargains for that? Some parents accept it, some parents regret their decision. This was not what they wanted when they wanted a family, and they want to return it, but they can't, so now they resent their predicament. My gremlin hatched out of that resentment.

My mother has the stones to admit not so much the regret, but that she didn't know what she was getting into and that being a mother was difficult and nothing anyone should do unless they want to. My father, watching my brothers be fathers, admitted that he didn't enjoy being a parent to at least two of we three kids. If you asked them, they'd say that, of course they wanted us and of course they loved us and of course they don't regret us. If you lived it, you'd know that, of course, they wanted us and loved us (as far as they were able), but they regretted us every single day and -- at least in my mother's case -- told us explicitly that she hated us and wished we would just go away or be something totally different than what we were.

To be fair, I know that, as far as she is capable of being introspective, she regrets that and feels tremendous guilt for it, too. I can feel a lot of sympathy for her because of that. Heck, I love her more, as a woman, for that. Guilt and regret we both know.

I feel stupid going over this, yet again, although I understand it a little more each time. I'm understanding some of my core beliefs, here, the rules that have governed my life without me actually being aware of them. You see, babies don't know the difference between themselves and the world, especially their parents. So, if their parents resent them, regret them, and see their very existence as an annoyance, well, then that baby ingests the complete inconvenience of their being as much as they ingest formula or a belief in a god. The parent is sorry for the baby's existence, so the baby becomes sorry for her own existence and even hates her own existence. That baby becomes a child, who becomes and adult, who makes decisions based on that hatred of her own self, which lead to more self-hatred, which leads to more bad decisions, and on and on.

That is the big gremlin: self-loathing. You don't just get over that, or outgrow it. You chain it up, maybe, and sit in constant vigilance that it might escape. You also try to starve it.

One of the treats my Gremlin of Self-Loathing loves to eat is that tension between perfection and failure. Somewhere along the line, I also learned that I have to be perfect or I am a failure. I know, with my rational mind, that this is stupid. Much of what goes on in your head when you have a mental illness is stupid to sane people, but it is every bit as much as real to you as the law of gravity -- although superstition might be a more apt analogy. Knowing that makes you not entirely trust sane people. Not that sane people are bad or intentionally insensitive, just that they don't know the Big Crazy from the inside, so they don't get it, although the good sane people try when necessary. They were lucky. They never hated themselves and not understanding how someone could hate themselves is a pretty sane position.

Getting back to this lesson, in it, not only must I be perfect or a failure, but perfection was always just out of reach. If I only worked a little harder, starved myself a little more, stayed up a little later, woke up a little earlier, studied just a little harder, disciplined myself a little more 00 if I did something -- anything -- just a little more than I was doing it, I'd be perfect. Again, that's stupid, too; and, again, it's just as real as gravity. So, in the effort to outrun failure through perfection, I exhaust myself. Heck, sometimes, in trying to outrun failure by simply getting through the day, I exhaust myself. When I exhaust myself, the Giant Gremlin of Self-Loathing pounces.

These past two weeks, the mundane bullshit of busywork that constitutes at least 75% of my job has exhausted me to the point that some of my lesser gremlins escaped. They wore me out even more, at which point this Giant Gremlin saw his chance. Weak though he was, he saw that I had become weaker, and that I had become overconfident that he was dead, and made his move. Since Friday morning, he has been feasting on me, and he invited even more of all of the lesser, equally starving gremlins to the party.

I'm not sure what to do next. I will, of course, do something next. When I was younger, I just let them devour me. I didn't know any better and, of course, that's one of the bad decisions that were wholly mind. I do know better now, just not better enough beyond getting through the day. I want more than getting through the day, but that will have to do for the moment, especially this particular moment when the day is slipping beyond its beginning point.