I started a project earlier this year about Six Words, It kind of went away as I got distracted but I have been thinking about them, and today I answered a question or Reddit that brought them back to the forefront.
Ultimately the question was about reputation. At least my answer was about reputation. For the Stoic, reputation is a moral indifferent. It does not make us good or bad. I referenced the Six Words exercise in my advice.
The hypocrisy of this has not escaped me.
I have been in a funk. I’ve spent a great deal of the month in full Marvin the Paranoid Android mode. Self-deprecation is my bread and butter. The old mantras are coming back: The world will be better when you’re dead. They’ll need to bury you in a football field to accommodate all the people who want to dance on your grave. It is physically impossible to be as dumb as I look.
Nobody else sees me as poorly as I see myself. Nobody sees this fat, useless old man who only causes problems and inconveniences for people. Nobody sees the idiot who stabbed himself in the hand the other day, or who failed to get on the damn exercise bike, or sits spinning the short-attention-span social media wheel for hours and hours when there are things to do. It’s NaNo for crying out loud and I have 15K and no idea how to finish anything I’ve started.
Yet people tell me I’m a good person. They thank me when I read in church, or lead evening prayer, or do the dishes, or help everyone remember what version of our choir robes we’re supposed to wear. I even get compliments on my beard! I just don’t get it. They ask me to dinner, they go drinking with me after choir. They ask for my advice on things.
And old Eeyore over here can’t bring himself to agree with any of it.
I find myself unable to trust my own judgment about myself. Some people go through like thinking they are God’s gift to the universe, and I see myself as God’s natural dumping place for mistakes and shit. It is not the world I react to, according to the Stoics, but my judgments about the world. I am still part of the world, and all the evidence is I can’t see myself clearly.
So what do I do?
I go back to the six words and try to stick to them. It’s so easy to twist them around. Dependable isn’t a good thing when I think I’ll be more reliable in fucking up than doing the right thing. Knowledgeable is a trap that can be suffocating because you can’t teach a person what they think they already know. Wise can be subverted by biography. Honest is diffused by “I think he really believes this, which is a shame”.
So I need to not twist them. I need to rely on other people to tell me what I’m actually good at, and I need to believe them more than I believe myself. I need to trust other people’s impressions of me more than I trust my own.
Because according to the Stoic model, the harsh truth of the matter is I’m choosing to be miserable. I’m choosing to see myself in such a poor light, and it really feels like blaming the victim, which I abhor but seem to do it to myself all the time.
Perhaps I’ve never really dug into the true reasons I hate myself. I have many theories.
One, when I was a kid in school I knew myself to be the youngest member of my class, and I thought I was smarter and more clever than anyone else, including the teacher. This did not make my primary school experience a pleasant one. One of the ways schools are supposed to socialize children is to teach them organically what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t. Unfortunately bullying was in the acceptable column and I was bullied a lot. I learned to insult myself to prevent others from doing so. This is even advice the Stoics recommend. Self-deprecation. Is that all he said about me? He could have found more faults!
Two, my brain simply doesn’t hold on to dopamine or serotonin or any of the other “good feeling” hormones. I am pretty sure my brain’s leptin receptors don’t work well, which has made losing weight difficult. Who is to say other receptors don’t work. Good things happen to me and my brain just doesn’t pick up on it.
Three, (and this is really really unlikely) I was sexually assaulted as a child. I have heard stories of children who are victims having serious mood swings, and my mother described me as a happy baby, always smiling and having a good time with life, following my older brother around and having a good time of things, then one day I put a paper bag over my head when I left the house so nobody would have to look at me. A switch flipped in my brain. I understand that this happens to children who are abused. This is really an unlikely scenario because while there are people I could count as suspects, I also know that those kind of people don’t limit themselves to one target, and I was the only apparent target, as none of my classmates in school or church seemed to go through this transition.
I suspect the first case is the best explanation. The second would probably require a medical solution, and the third is admittedly stinks like a conspiracy theory.
I’ve tried therapy, but all this sounds silly when I tell anyone about it. I’m in a good place in my life. Busy at work, fat but otherwise healthy. All of my complaints about my life seem petty and risible. I can’t take therapists seriously when they try to validate my feelings. That’s out.
So back to the drawing board. Back to the slow climb up from the pit I’ve dug myself.