Why self-loathing is a total waste of your time

So I read a blog today by a 28-year-old man, who confessed to self-loathing. Then one of his commenters, a woman, agreed.

Seriously?

Loud About Loathing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let’s be a little sensible here.

We’re managed to out-source manufacturing and X-ray reading and people now have virtual assistants working for pennies 12 time zones away.

Why not outsource self-loathing?

Think of all the time it will free up.

No more staring at your computer muttering “I suck! I’m such a shitty writer.”

No more standing before the mirror, grabbing rolls of your fat, groaning “I hate my ass/thighs/stomach!”

No more trying to make music/create a dance/knit a sweater, whispering to yourself with hatred: “Why bother?”

Let someone else hate you!

The truth is that other people will be so breathtakingly mean, if you give them half the chance, you’ll never have to beat yourself up again. I got a “review” on Amazon of my latest book, in which I was described as “bitter, pretentious and lazy, lazy, lazy.”

Now, that’s some kind of nasty! I felt like a rank amateur in the face of that level of loathing.

The sad truth is that self-loathing is essentially self-indulgent. It’s common in your 20s, maybe in your 30s, as some of your peers will inevitably race ahead of you into law partnerships or see their work on Broadway or move into their third huge home. Whatever you’re doing may start to feel inconsequential, even if it’s really not. A crap economy doesn’t help.

The good news? Once you hit 40, or beyond, you’ll be so grateful if you’re simply alive, healthy, employed, solvent and loved that all that silly shit will no longer seem like an appealing use of your time or energy.

It’s sort of interesting being loathed. I prefer it to indifference, actually.

What are the downsides of being loathed?

– Someone may try to kill you (bad)

– Someone may try to physically harm you (bad)

– Someone may try to damage your professional reputation (annoying but you can deal with it)

– Someone may try to sabotage your personal reputation (bullying sucks)

But unless these are the real and likely consequences of such enmity, do you really care that much if someone hates you?

The worst person who can hate you is you.

C-C-C-C-Confidence!

That's what I'm talking about!!Image by Rodimuspower via Flickr

Can we get anything done without it?

Yet, and yet and yet, I have entire days I think I just can’t: make that call, send that email, ask that favor, knock on that door or send that resume.

People have told me for decades how confident I appear, and the operative word might be appear, for there are too many days I feel like some medieval warrior girding her loins before even picking up the phone or sending out an email.

As someone with no steady income, salary or pension down the line, I’m in lioness mode: I eat only what I catch and kill. That means having to hustle for clients every day, whether reaching out to former or current ones or finding and cultivating new ones.

Either way, it means a lot of people contact and no guarantee of the outcome.

Which, if I fail, means — I’m broke!

No pressure.

I can blame my reticence on a few things:

– I’ve been canned from a few jobs, which has permanently dented my sense of likability, no matter how businesslike a layoff can be

– I was badly bullied in high school for three years by a small gang of boys

– I spent ages 5 to 30 in Canada, a country that has no tolerance for self-promotion or boasting then moved to the U.S., a place with a population 10 times larger, competing with some mighty sharp elbows. Time to man up!

– I faced a tough crowd in my own family, people who often found much to criticize and little to praise

But without a cheery demeanor and the conviction you have something worthwhile to offer, it’s tough to get out there and ask for what you want, whether a job referral, grant recommendation or help with a new project.

I had recently reached out to two people, one an old friend who didn’t call back for weeks and one a new contact whose initial voicemail sounded fairly frosty. So it was with a heavy heart I called both of them back.

Both were delighted to hear from me. Both had lost my phone number and wanted to hear my ideas.

If I hadn’t had the confidence to reach out again, I would have lost out on some cool opportunities.

Do you ever feel lily-livered?

How do you get past it?

Related articles

• VIDEO: Unemployed ‘lack confidence’ (bbc.co.uk)
• How to Build Your Job-Search Confidence (money.usnews.com)

Enough Aw-Shucks-ing, Ladies — Kick Ass And Shout It Out!

Hell, where prideful chicks fry forever. Image via Wikipedia

Hell, yeah!

Loved this post by Kate Harding on why women really need to stop “ah-shucksing” themselves into oblivion. (Thanks, T/S intern Chloe, for the tip!)

I’ve seen this my entire life. Women who are actually proud of what they do — whether breastfeeding twins and/or running a law firm and/or completing their first (or 25th) marathon or caring for an ill, aging parent — are trained from birth to pretend it’s nothing.

Really.

Because…?

Because, more than likely, some other women who find the whole confidence thing a little too scary and threatening will get all chicken-necked and hiss, to her face, or more likely behind it: “Who does she think she is anyway?”

Women are just as nasty to one another as we are to ourselves. We’ve already got (sorry, good guys, we love you) too many male feet crushing our windpipes, whether at work or domestically or economically or politically to need a stiletto on top of it. But when we can’t say “Yup, I’m really good at X,” we do it to ourselves.

I did this last week.

I’d been telling a fellow board member (yes, I serve on two pretty busy volunteer boards, with four face to face meetings a year, monthly conference calls and many ad-hoc emails) how hard I’d worked, because I love it, on our apartment. I’ve studied interior design at a great school, The New York School of Interior Design and even got an A (yay!) in our notoriously tough color class. When a colleague said, admiringly: “Your apartment sounds beautiful,” I was stymied.

“Um. Yeah. Um. Probably.” Modesty forbade me from saying, yes, it is.

I won my National Magazine Award in 1998 but have never even framed the certificate, which is quite beautiful and done in calligraphy. It’s in a cupboard. Where would I put it in, in a one-bedroom apartment, that isn’t eye-rollingly obnoxious?

Some people think I’m arrogant as shit (and maybe I am) because I’m usually really proud of my accomplishments. My Dad, who’s won all sorts of amazing awards for his work (which he’s hidden in the basement or even given away), poked me recently: “You don’t lack for confidence, do you?”

This can also be a deeply culturally-ingrained behavior you carry with you for decades, even when you live somewhere like New York City and its mostly-wealthy suburbs where modesty is seen as some sort of mental disability. Canadians, bless ‘em,  are heavily socialized to be self-deprecating and reflexively shrug off all praise. That Nobel? Feh. See also: Japan (the tallest nail gets hammered down) and Sweden and Australia (the tall poppy gets its head cut off.)

I live in New York, work in a dying industry filled with thousands of sharp-elbowed, well-connected competitors, in a recession. Not the best time to hide your light (no matter if it’s 40-watt) under a bushel.

If still you’re denying your fabulousness (which does not mean Facebooking every bloody mouse-fart you or your children or dogs just completed!), stop right now.

Demi's Missing Hip, Madonna's 'Ageless' Face, Crystal's Rolls: Newsweek's Gallery Of Re-Touched Women

A little young, but, you never know...Image via Wikipedia

Read this and weep — or snicker. But don’t compare your butt, thighs, crow’s feet or cellulite to theirs. They don’t have any!

For any woman, and her daughter(s) or younger female friends, who looks at magazine photos of “perfect” faces and bodies and despairs, buck up. It’s all about the re-touching. Lots of bright lighting and some Botox and great make-up all help, but nothing can beat a techno-fix after the photos have been shot. Any woman who miserably compares her real-life body and skin to the fake flawlessness of the images shoved at her daily in every medium is asking for trouble: plastic surgery, anorexia, bulimia, dieting. Misery.

Trying to attain the literally unattainable means billions in profit for the manufacturers of fake boobs, cosmetic procedures and products, diet companies, gyms. Women trying to look “just like” the women shown to us in ads and editorial images are trying to scale a greasy pole. It simply won’t work.

I attended a social event last night and wondered who the hhhhhottie in the black sequined T-shirt, thigh-high boots and skinny jeans might be. She had honey blond hair and looked stunning. It was a woman I’ve known for many years, but who I met when she weighed — as she told me last night — 90 pounds more. She was always, one could tell, beautiful. Now she’s slim, confident and — as the French say, bien dans sa peau (literally “happy in her skin”) — as much for her pride in beating back her food-related demons as re-discovering the pleasure of easily dressing well and enjoying her corporeal self.

I asked how she did it: a full year of meal replacements (2 shakes, 2 energy bars and 1 meal a day) and re-thinking what food means to her. I  need to lose weight and find the endless drama of that tedious, boring, frustrating and sometimes just overwhelming on top of my many other priorities.

Hard work, discipline, self-awareness, she said, without using those words. The basic tools we all know, deep down, rarely change in this regard.

Not re-touching.