Cui bono?

First, please accept my apologies for having a Latin subject line. It will hopefully make sense by the end of this email.

As a pretext: I am not a mental health professional. I am not a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a therapist, a social worker or a doctor. To you, I am most likely another person you vaguely know from the internet, whose newsletter you decided to subscribe to for reasons beyond my comprehension.

I am a person with mental illness who struggles with crippling feelings of self-doubt and on bad days, utter contempt for myself. Maybe you’re like this too (I’m sorry.)

Sonya Renee Taylor, activist and author of The Body Is Not An Apology, poses the question: “Who profits from my self-loathing?”

I learned this this from Shine, a mental health app founded by Marah Lidey and Naomi Hirabayashi. Self-care apps as a genre get a lot of criticism — much of it deserved — but Shine has helped me refocus my attention with guided meditations and daily check-ins. (The app’s Instagram-ready user interface, which pierces the heart of any Millennial woman who has ever wondered, “Should I move to Taos and get really into turquoise?” doesn’t hurt.)

Which brings me to the heinously boarding-school-vibes subject line of this email. As anyone who has taken one (1) criminal law class in college and now considers themselves a legal expert or has watched over 100 hours of Law And Order: SVU knows, “cui bono” is a Latin phrase that means “who benefits?” The phrase is used to narrow down suspects in a criminal investigation: the person who would benefit most from the commission of a crime is a likely person of interest.

That is a long-winded way of saying this: I realized that for years, I have been marking the people I love as suspects in the case of my own self-hatred. The story I tell myself is that Person X is mad at me for not returning their text last night, while Person Y is deeply disappointed in me for not responding to their email in a timely manner, all the while Persons Q and Z are apoplectic that I ghosted their book club for the past two months.

I’ve been acting as judge, jury and executioner in trials that the people I care about don’t know exist, with the same result applied to myself every time: guilty, guilty, guilty. But how does my own guilt and self-loathing — about being an inferior partner, a terrible friend, a monstrous daughter — how does that help them?

It doesn’t, of course. Yet my brain is terrifyingly adept at taking any stimulus — say, a one-word response to a text message — and turning it into a referendum on my own worth as a person (goose egg, baby!!!) I assume if you’ve read this far, you’ve experienced this dynamic as well.

Which is why I’m writing this. I haven’t sent this newsletter in a long time because I tell myself that I don’t have any ideas, and that even when I do have ideas, they aren’t worth sharing. I imagine you opening this email and reading these words with disgust. I see a mass unsubscribing, an inevitable and total rejection.

This scapegoating is totally unfair to you, dear reader. It’s not fair of me to assume only the worst intentions from you as you read this. And it’s deeply unfair to assume that you would somehow benefit from wanting to hurt me. I am sorry for assuming the worst in you to use as scaffolding for my own self-hatred.

My friend Katie McDonough told me something once that I think of often. I said something self-deprecating to her about my work, and instead of indulging my self-pity, she said, “Don’t say that about my friend Emma.” I encourage you to insert your own name in there when your brain is beating up on you. (Thank you, Katie!)

Which leaves me with the question: who does benefit from my self-loathing? For one, the parasitic part of my brain that pushes every day without tiring to continue hating itself until I die. But it’s more than that. Who benefits from me not feeling productive enough? Who benefits from me feeling like a failure? Who benefits from me telling myself that I’m a shitty thinker and writer, that my career is over, that everyone thinks I’m a joke and are lying to me to be nice?

I’m not fishing for compliments. The answer, my friends, is the same old foe who lies in wait under our bunks, who tells us simultaneously that we are not enough and all too much for the people we care about. Maybe, if only we worked a little bit harder, we would finally find some peace. Maybe if we tried a little harder to squeeze a square peg into a round hole, then things would be perfect.

Again, I’m just another white woman on the internet writing about self-care. But it has helped me to approach my self-loathing like a souvenir in a curio cabinet rather than a monster under my bed. It might be worth asking yourself: who put that thing there? Why did they put it in the middle of the parlor? Why am I in this haunted Victorian mansion to begin with? Who benefits?

Thanks for reading, more soon.