You're Not Doomed to Hate Yourself

Self-compassion, anxiety, akrasia, and what we can do when we take a backward step

“In the face of critically important insights, we get distracted, proud, or fidgety. We may prefer to do almost anything other than take in information that could save us.”

Alain de Botton, The School of Life: An Emotional Education

Life does not bring us all that many moments of profound realisation. I had one this week, while on holiday. Or rather, a slow, crawling realisation. It was the first extended period I have taken away from work in several years. The last time I took more than a week off was when my mother died. That decision was made for me by the fact that, for a while, there were no words to write. Or rather I couldn’t find any. This time was different – the break from work was a voluntary lacuna – a week of my own company and that of other people without thinking of deadlines or stories, or the responsibilities that awaited me at home. A rest.

The plan was not to contemplate what might make good copy or fret over the vicissitudes of freelance work, but to do my utmost to exist solely inside the boundary of the moment. I closed my laptop and holstered my pen, substituting both for the rich pleasures of Sardinian heat, pasta and pastries. Sitting on a beach and digging my toes deep into scalding, powdery sand until they found the cool damp below, untouched by the brutal force of the sun. Drinking impossibly smooth coffee outdoors while quietly watching others inhabit their morning. Wading gently into a tepid, azure sea that cradles your body like a bolt of blue silk. I went to a wedding in a red dress and enjoyed a seven-hour feast of such obscene deliciousness that it will endure in my memory probably until the day I die.

I indulged in all these joyous experiences and realised with a sinking sense of dread that I found myself unable to immerse fully or easily in any of them. Each of them, without exception, was mitigated by a narrative inside my own mind which compromised my ability to fully enjoy them, to feel comfortable, or, ultimately, to get out of my own way. As the week progressed, I began to feel more maudlin in contrast to my merry surroundings. Deeply conscious of how lucky I was to have the privilege of enjoying such a holiday, I felt tormented by my own sense of displacement; caught between how self-indulgent the feeling was and a sense of shame at my own pathetic failure to simply allow myself to enjoy something lovely without debilitating self-awareness or criticism. Murkily, I became aware of a sense of being undeserving of the experience that I found myself having, and realised that ultimately, I was sabotaging it. ‘This’, I thought to myself ironically, ‘is why you can’t have nice things’.

Looking back through the above, I am embarrassed by it – it seems to reveal a sort of pitiful weakness of character that I would much rather nobody else knew about. It looks from the outside as though other people don’t tie themselves in knots this way – as though they can simply feel deserving of a wonderful experience and enjoy it without feeling like an impostor. Or that’s how I’ve decided it looks. One of the most frustrating aspects of adult life is the realisation that we sometimes (or often) need to relearn lessons we have already taken pains to teach ourselves in the past. The ones that we undertake to correct or rebalance the behaviours which may have served us under traumatic circumstances but lead to maladjustment and confusion under healthy ones. A tendency toward pre-emptive, almost protective negativity is something I learned early in life and have fought hard to master through adulthood. I spent a short time this week around a person who has the same trait and found it so parasitic toward the good will of everyone else that I began to feel profoundly affected by it. Their relentless negativity regardless of circumstance was draining in the extreme. It oiled under my skin and weighed me down like a wet coat – not just because it is an objectively selfish trait, but because I recognised my own worst qualities in it and realised that I have ultimately made less progress than I had thought.

The truth is that I had a week away with good people, engaging in new, positive and enriching experiences, and I spent most of it thinking about myself. Thinking poorly about myself, to be precise – in a way that felt frighteningly outside my control – but that is no less a form of abject selfishness. My self-absorption prevented me from connecting truly with others or from feeling the contentment that I knew was offering itself to me if I could just let it in. You might call it anxiety, I suppose, but it is a feeling both self-hating and narcissistic, centring the self in scenarios where that is completely inappropriate. The feeling was not a revealed truth from the universe, but something I was constructing to my own detriment and, even worse, that of others who may have felt exhausted by my strained, taciturn manner and inappropriate lack of enthusiasm.

The realisation was fundamentally depressing, and I wanted to ignore it. In The School of Life: An Emotional Education, philosopher Alain de Botton writes “It was the philosophers of ancient Greece who first… described the structural deficiencies of our minds with a special term. They proposed that we suffer from akrasia, commonly translated as “weakness of will,” a habit of not listening to what we accept should be heard and a failure to act upon what we know is right. It is because of akrasia that crucial information is frequently lodged in our minds without being active in them, and it is because of akrasia that we often both understand what we should do and resolutely omit to do it.” There is so much incentive to allow these sorts of realisations to slip from our grasp – to convince ourselves that ignoring them is not in itself a choice. There is, after all, only a limited window in which to act once you learn something fundamental about your character. “Moreover” De Botton says, “we forget almost everything. Our memories are sieves, not robust buckets. What seemed a convincing call to action at 8 a.m. will be nothing more than a dim recollection by midday and an indecipherable contrail in our cloudy minds by evening. Our enthusiasms and resolutions can be counted upon to fade like the stars at dawn. Nothing much sticks.”

For some reason or other, this realisation has stuck thus far, and continued to gnaw at me. I could dismiss it as the self-indulgent navel-gazing of a weak person (a valid if uncompassionate interpretation) or take it seriously as a warning sign of something I must either change or be ruled by. It is the ghost of an angry child who grew up under profound uncertainty. Who learned to expect judgement from people whose role in her life should have been one of guidance and support. Who encountered kindness with suspicion and always felt undeserving. I thought that I had put that child to bed, and it was humbling and frightening to find her again, lurking darkly about on holiday, called forth from an unstable past to limit herself for fear of being excluded or found wanting. I find her distasteful, unevolved, and abhorrent. An emotional embodiment of my own failure to become, and to stay, better. A tether to a past self I don’t want to recognise.

Unsettled, I went back to De Botton’s words, which have helped before. “The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm… There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance.” It is always better to know yourself, and to remember that you are the product of your choices, but also of family and culture. Our beginnings are never our fault, for all they may leave us a long or difficult legacy to work through or deficiencies of character or experience to make up for.

Compassion for oneself – sincere compassion which takes the form neither of denial nor enabling but of honest, well-intended self-reflection – is all the more difficult for those who did not receive much compassion in childhood. You may feel you don’t deserve it. You may not know where to begin. Or, like me, you may find yourself having regressed for some reason, and in urgent need of a reminder. Having compassion for oneself means doing what is best, not what is most comfortable, as you would do for someone you love without ever questioning their worthiness or their value. Compassion entails the presumption of value and working from there. Sometimes, you have to begin again, or go back over old territory. The only failure is in realising this and choosing not to do it.