Hating hating myself

The feeling I hate the most is the self-loathing. I hate it. It’s not the self-loathing of the apathetic, although it sometimes touches down there briefly. This is the self-loathing of the freak. The problem. The black sheep who just couldn’t ever get it right, and has now finally gone and fucked it up beyond all imagining.

That’s not the way that my family or friends feel; that’s how I feel about myself. Silent screaming hatred.

It feels like all sorts of awful things. Like I want to collapse. Like I want to grab hold of the hair at the back of my head, and rip off my scalp and face in one forward and downward yanking motion. Like I want to stab a knife in my chest near my heart, on an angle, and rotate the handle in a circle like I’m cutting and eye out of a potato. Like hopelessness. Like when I try to grab hold of my being, there’s a hole in my fabric, and my hand passes through. An old wound.

It’s old hatred. It’s like I created this monster to patrol my gender boundaries: a reflexive torrent of self-loathing. And now I have no more use for it, but it still performs its function. Not all the time, since I’ve spent two years dismantling the fucker, but now I’m right in the line of fire when the hatred starts to build.

I have become exactly the way I was never supposed to be. Imagine the fury that patrolling part of me feels at failing in its only task—the task it was created for—protecting my manhood and normalcy. I have scorned my own automaton, and turned my back on its work. So it, part of me, rains its hatred on the way I need to be.