I think it goes without saying that a symptom of mental illness can be a lack of self-esteem. That’s not to say the two are always linked; you can have low self-esteem without being mentally ill, and you can be mentally ill without low self-esteem. Most of the time, I have pretty great self-esteem. Like, 80% of the time. But that other 20% is still there, like it probably is for anybody. You have moments of self-doubt, and moments when you really don’t like yourself, or think yourself worthy of anything.
When I’m in that 20%, it’s like my OCD, anxiety, and depression combine into a perfect storm of self-loathing, self-hatred, and shame.
Let me give you an example of how this process works:
- I get a little down.
- I start thinking about how much I suck.
- I think of someone who I believe doesn’t suck, or does suck but is in some way less sucky than me.
- Obsessive comparison making time!
- I tell myself that I don’t deserve to be as thin/rich/successful/happy/cool as the person I’m comparing myself to.
- I make a list of all the bad things I’ve ever done.
- I remind myself of how often I think rude/cruel/uncharitable thoughts about others.
- I decide that obviously I’m a terrible person, convince myself that nobody loves me, and agree with them on all the reasons I made up for them to not like me.
Steps one through five are fairly self-explanatory, right? Numbers three and four are usually about other authors or people in my industry, but sometimes I mix it up with figures from my lost Broadway dreams, just to remind myself that I failed at something I once loved.
I am my own toxic best friend.
But I digress, and it’s time to take a trip to six town, which is convoluted as fuck. I think about the time I was four years old and I considered stealing a sticker. I didn’t actually steal the sticker, but my mental state doesn’t care. I considered stealing. That makes me a monster. The fact that I was only a child doesn’t even enter into the picture, except to prove that I was born a conniving, thieving little shit. And even though I clearly remember thinking, “I shouldn’t steal, because it’s wrong,” I convince myself that the only reason I didn’t steal the sticker was because I was afraid of being caught.
Number six goes completely off the rails. I think of all the times I’ve ever thought anything mean. That means every time I’ve ever been mad enough to think, “I could murder that person.” Every time I’ve ever thought something stupid in my youth, like when I was strongly Pro-Life in my teens and early twenties. Things I have fantasized about sexually and later was totally ashamed of. And I tell myself, “These are all reasons that you’re a bad person, and that’s why you don’t deserve anything good in your life.”
The fact that there really are awesome things in my life? That evidence is blocked by the aggressive young prosecutor from the district attorney’s office, the one who has everything to prove and who is my combined Frankenstein’s monster of mental illness.
Number eight does what it says on the tin: after hours of mentally assaulting myself, I decide that I suck and I’m never going to not suck. I should skip my run or quit my job or never get on twitter again. I should binge eat like crazy, or drink a dangerous amount. And at my very lowest? This combination of mental illness and low self-esteem has lead to thoughts of suicide. It all kind of comes out in this big jumble of:
Ugh, Jenny, why are you so awful? Look at Anne Hathaway! You could have been Anne Hathaway, but nope, you had to cheat on a spelling test in second grade and you secretly thought your coworker was faking a miscarriage and that’s why you’re lazy and stupid and you will never, ever be truly happy because you don’t deserve it. You should kill yourself.
Today, though, I got to number six and I realized… nobody in the world knows that I threw a tantrum in the post office when I was seven, and anyone who claims they’ve never had a single embarrassingly horrible thought about another human being is a fucking liar. The only person who is using all of that to form an opinion about me? Is myself.
That one realization stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t go on to the other steps. I couldn’t get to “you should kill yourself,” because the level of denial I had to reach, the jumping through hoops I would have to achieve in order to make myself go through the whole process was just exhausting. This time, it went like:
- I get a little down.
- I start thinking about how much I suck.
- I remind myself that pretty much everybody sucks.
- I remember that not only can no one can change the past, but hardly anyone remembers it, anyway.
- I compare my present day actions with my thoughts, and decide that no matter how mean my thoughts might be, if I’m not acting on them or letting them influence my behavior, I’m probably not worse than anyone else.
- I watch dolphin videos on YouTube.
Now, there’s no saying that this same healthy thing will happen every time I go down that destructive path. But now that I know there’s a fork in the path, one that isn’t covered with brambles and thorns and is instead evenly paved and blessedly free of goose shit, I might be able to choose which way I want to go.