Hating Yourself Less

I'm going to sound like a self-taught life guru in the following post, but I do not care. Every person, at some point, decides they're done with their bullshit, figures out a way to make a radical change in their life half-successfully, and starts itching to share their newfound enlightenment with everyone in the ways of a self-help sage on the internet.

I figured there was space in the middle of alpha male hustle grinder self-improvement dudes and hedonistic motivational hippie blond women on the internet, so I thought I'd step in.

You are allowed to call it preaching, and you are allowed to call it life lessons shared with generosity by a hot 25-year-old girl on the internet.

The last few months have taught me that most complex life problems actually have very simple solutions. In fact, it's one of the things that makes these problems so frustrating— the knowledge that the answer is simple, but one we do not like to hear.

For example, the simple solution to stop hating anything in life is to do either of the two things:

1. stop hating (accept it) or,

2. change what you hate

No matter how many nuances to the problem you explore, I can assure you that any decision that leads to a satisfying outcome will fall under one of these two categories.

This is very corny, and I kid you not, but — the serenity prayer we hastily recited at the end of every school day before dashing home is ACTUALLY some of the most profound wisdom I have encountered in my adult life, and you'd be surprised how many smart, functional adults find it difficult to practically exercise it.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

(I mean, what a banger!)

I have learned that all the corny 'quotes of the day' you read written on the blackboard in junior school are actually all fucking true. We hated them then because they were trite and cliché. But all that shit is cliché for a reason. It's cliché because it is overused. It is overused because it fucking WORKS!

Honesty really is the best policy! Where there is a will, there truly is a fucking way! The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I know, right!? What we learn with pleasure, we never forget. SO TRUE, BESTIE!! Everything is hard before it is easy. You tell them that, Johann Wolfgang, you tell them!!!

My rip-off of the serenity prayer is that you change either of the two variables. You change your feelings (from hatred to acceptance) or you change the object of your feeling. And you use your gumption of time to decide which change stands most impactful on your life.

Either way: inaction is not an option.

Word Problems: Solved Examples

One: Feeling vs. Object
Last year, I hated my writing. So I wrote and wrote and wrote until I got to a point where I didn't hate it. This year, I hate my writing again, but the agenda and focus of my life lie somewhere else this year, so I just decided I'm going to be okay with the feeling of hating my writing.

The first year, I changed the things I could change. The second year, I changed my feelings about the thing I no longer had the motivation to change. Either way, there was change. And both ways, it brought me peace of mind.

Two: Feeling vs. Feeling
Problem:
A. I hate the pigmented texture of my skin.
B. I also hate the hyper-consumerism around makeup and skincare and do not wish to spend my money and time in an industry designed to make me feel more and more uncomfortable with my earthly shell.

Solution:
A. I stop hating my skin and live with what I have.
B. I give up my anal ideologies and buy two skincare products, knowing fully well I am going to be lured into buying three, five, eight more in the coming months, possibly to a point where my awareness of hyperconsumption will be shadowed by my need to look better

(Hint: I gave up my anal ideologies and got into skincare because I am just a girl)

You either change or accept.

Accept or Change.
Accept or Change.
Accept or Change.
All other options in the middle (complacency or inaction) make you a distasteful person and very often, insufferable to be around.

How to not be insufferable, or: build confidence and stop fucking hating yourself

To have confidence in yourself, you have to stop hating yourself. To stop hating yourself, you have to start respecting yourself. To respect yourself, you have to fucking show up. You have to prove to yourself that you are worthy of respect. You have to make commitments to yourself, and you need to fucking fulfil them. You have to gaslight yourself into taking yourself seriously. And to take yourself seriously, you have to keep using the word gaslight callously in your essays for added dramatic effect!

A lot of the self-loathing we feel is because our actions do not align with our ideologies. For example: I respect and admire a person who can wake up in the morning and begin their day with a few pages followed by a sweat routine before they get into the work that wins them bread. So I do not respect myself because I am not this person yet.

Two possible ways I see myself combating this inconsistency are:
I change the idea of what I admire and respect (bring down my aspirations to the level of my actions) OR, I change the things I am currently doing (elevate my actions to align with the ideas of the higher self I wish to achieve).

It might sound like doing the latter is almost always the righteous thing to do, but you would be killing yourself with high-performance expectations when your aspirations are a little unrealistic (as they often tend to be) and the things you wish to change are out of your control (refer to the serenity prayer above again, amen!)

You hate yourself when your actions are not in alignment with your ideologies, goals, and ideas of self.

You do not become a bad bitch by sitting in bed all day and chanting affirmations like: I am healthy, I am wealthy, I am rich, I am that bitch. You become that bad bitch when you get out of bed (after those affirmations of course) and put in the work you need to put in a way that compounds every day to make you healthy, make you wealthy, make you rich, AND that bitch!

I now wake up early in the morning, not because I'm a morning person, but simply because it is easier to respect myself as a person who wakes up early. And I don't think you need to change everything about yourself or put yourself in discomfort constantly — so you can respect yourself. But if a small change or discomfort is bringing a net positive in your life, then 'I think I'm being too hard on myself' is just a psyop you're playing on yourself to resist uncomfortable change.

I guess this is also one of my biggest problems with a lot of spiritual self-help cults. We went from extreme romanticism of the grind to the victimization of self, where the slightest discomfort that you need and should be undergoing to make space for growth is shut down with 'sweety, no you're being so hard on yourself.'

Sweety, no, you've just been rotting at the same place you have been for years and hating yourself for it. So you can decide if you want to take the discomfort climb out of the rut or stay in there and cry about how your feet hurt too much each time you make a move. (ouch!)

It is very easy to fall into a self-loathing spiral when you keep watching yourself commit to things and not fulfill them.

There are two wolves inside you: one that decided she would hit the gym in the morning but did not (once again), and one that watched you promise yourself to hit the gym in the morning and not show up (once again).

There is always a part of you that is observing what the other parts of you are doing (or not doing), and often it is easy to temporarily gaslight that part into being okay with lazy, unhealthy and toxic patterns. That part of you will show up to all your cope fests with a smiling face. But that part knows. That part of you knows what you did. That is the part that creeps out in the middle of your morning coffee and tells you 'BTW, you are like totally insufficient. You should probably hate yourself for it!'

‘That part' also commonly known as the conscience — is a pretty pesky bitch, but it's probably nice to make an acquaintance and have it on your contact list. That part takes note of everything. It maintains a balance sheet of what you give, what you take, what you said, and how you flaked — this time, and that time, and all the times before that.

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Confidence comes from keeping the promises you made to yourself.

Confidence is built on trust. And we trust people who tend to show up in the way they said they would, including ourselves. To start the process, you have to start making promises that are meaningful to you, and then fulfill them consistently to win the trust of your conscience.

In my case, for example, as comfortable and content as I have been with the person I am (can't help it, I am objectively cool), I still didn't feel like I was living up to my full potential. I was capable of more but resisting that growth because my current self was already "better than most" (duh).

My ambitions were bigger, and I trusted them to be realistic because I trusted in myself to achieve them (because I built that confidence in me by showing up for myself in the past). But because one part of me felt like I'm already ahead of other people (I'm cocky like that), and the other part had an intense fear of success (I'm scared I will come too far ahead of my friends, and they will hate me for it), I kept stewing in inaction and therefore hating myself (because my actions were not consistent with my potential).

Basically, I've just been a cocky, confident self-hater, and I've been that for a while.

But it is time to revamp the promise cards, set new goals for the woman I want to become next, and start aligning my present actions to make that future vision a reality.

I started with small things, but most importantly, I did not start with things I have had a pattern of failing at (read: writing consistently). To begin with, these are things I've had a rather easy time committing to: like waking up early (having a full-time job again helps), hitting the gym (honestly, I think I am addicted to my endorphins), eating cleaner (I try), and reading more paperbacks (damn, I almost forgot what the sound of flipping paper feels like).

For me, it helps to picture my ideal self at 30 and then reverse engineer what I need to do to become that. In my ideal world:

— 30-year-old Kaav has not doomscrolled her youth away. So 25-year-old Kaav has deleted social media from her phone and is very consciously practicing dopamine regulation.

— 30-year-old Kaav is not just a thin woman; she has a well-carved, curvy body. So 25-year-old Kaav spends 3 days a week working out to build a broad pair of shoulders.

— 30-year-old Kaav makes X amount of money in a month and has Y amount in a savings corpus, so 25-year-old Kaav cries 3x louder in guilt every time she gets sloshed with overpriced cocktails.

You know, that kind of thing...

Everything I want to be in the future, I can achieve by working towards it in the present. This is rather common knowledge that has started to make renewed sense in my life, of late.

Or maybe, I am taking real accountability for my actions for the first time in my life.

It is frighteningly easy to fool yourself, especially if you're as (smart and) investigative of yourself and your tendencies, quirks, and patterns as I am. It is very easy to keep track of your tastes and dietary habits to feed yourself lies you know you are likely to digest.

For all my supposed self-awareness, I'm a re-emerging master of my own delusion.

40% of the good things will happen to me with luck, but I have to do 60% of the work that makes me lucky. So I am doing the work now to get lucky, and I am doing what it takes to build evidence for my conscience.

I no longer want my conscience to roll its eyes at me every time I'm in the middle of a happy moment, 'FRAUD!!!' I want my conscience to look me in the eye and say, 'ya well, you know what, I guess you kind of deserved it!'