Learning To Live With Self-hate

I grew up hating myself. It was easy. I had a manic depressive mother, an alcoholic Dalit Heathcliff for a father, an alcoholic Uncle, a fascist, Christian fundamentalist grandmother, two mentally ill aunts, a cold and psychotic brother. I lived in poverty, was ‘brought up’ in the lap of indifference and incompetence, was harassed and humiliated in school as an effeminate homosexual, even before I knew what it meant to be homosexual. I was a skinny ugly, dark-skinned nerd who was mocked for just being, by ‘friends’ in Byculla, in Bombay. I could go on. I grew up on a steady diet of alcoholism, vicious violence, sexual abuse and insult, saw my mother face abuse for years and, finally, what I consider, be killed. How could I not hate myself?

As an adult, today, things have not changed all that much. I’ve faced, and continue to face, years of institutional homophobia and abuse; I’ve been blacklisted repeatedly by the Left-Liberal mafia for not being part of one of their cliques, for not licking their arse, for being a runt who tells it like it is, whether in a review or during a conversation. I have a boyfriend who is probably straight and does not like being seen with me in public. I’ve been sacked from multiple institutions and stamped on by gay activists as someone deserving it—I could go on. I am in debt from the long years spent in unemployment;, and every Raju, Vijay and Imran on the streets looks like he could spit on me. How could I not be disgusted with myself?

Freud, wise as ever, tells us that we are all narcissists, that these thumbnail sketches of my life that I have afforded above are little more than reproaches against the world, a cry at its injustices, the people in it I know and those I do not; the cry of the stuck melancholic who has not mourned his losses in his 1917 classic Mourning and Melan­cholia. That’s sobering and useful, but does it sunder oneself from the feelings of hatred and disgust? The disgust at the self, hatred of the self, hatred for one’s own body, hatred of being gay are all real. What does one do with disgust for/with the self? What does one do if one has never been loved? What does one do if the only person close to one, one’s mother, was a mental patient who suffered abuse all her life, so that her love was necessarily attenuated, whose mother I had to be?

For years, I saw my life only as revenge for her. I refused to let her go and never mourned her. I became Freud’s classic melancholic. After seeing this clearly in psychoanalytic therapy in my 40s—too late, too late—I have sought to change it. But is letting go of an image of the self, an image behind which one has hid, even possible at this late stage? Is changing self-hate into self-love ever possible at all as an adult? Does one learn from disgust?

What might one learn from disgust? People, including those who see themselves as friends, tell me I am full of anger and hatred and disgust—too intense, too hot-headed to handle. Hatred is seen as a bad thing, negative, something we need to flush down the toilet to be shiny, happy people. In the US, Ego Psychology-based model of the self (that we all subscribe to these days), we are told to never be negative and to send negative people packing out of our lives, to shun negativity of any kind, to embrace ourselves as (blinding) beacons of positivity.

In a world in which the Indian middle class has embraced so fiercely, one never does anything wrong, wrong is done to one; one is beyond reproach; all others are reproachable; one has no negativity or hate or guile; all others do; one is simultaneously a victim and also never only victim but also survivor, the other, only a victim. And yet, the ‘internet-ed’ Indian middle class is one of the most eggregious lots in the world, both online and offline. One only calls out and cancels people, one cannot be called out or cancelled; one only lynches, one is never lynched; one only razes certain houses; one’s house is never razed; one never hates Muslims; it is Muslims who hate themselves and all good things in the world, like the Hindu Rashtra, for example. They kill themselves in pogroms against them, which are then erased as ‘riots.’

The Subject—and there is a spine-chilling concordance between the loony US middle class one and the Indian one—has no culpability, no complicity and no accountability. Indeed, this subject has no unconscious and, arguably, no psyche at all. She/he lives in a Stepford Wives bubble, all squeaky clean, plasticine perfection even as her/his hands are soaked in the blood of the ‘Other’.

For us ordinary mortals not addicted to US TV shows and internet, hatred is incredibly important. I would be nothing if I did not hate patriarchy, sexism, racism, casteism, violence, environmental pollution, communalism and so much more that there is to rage against. For decades, feminists used, and continue to use, a hatred of patriarchy to fight for change. I channel all my hatred into various forms of activism as well. Self-hatred is a little more difficult to know what to do with. I am proud of my disgust for manual scavenging, pollution, craven mining, the rape and murder of Adivasis and Dalits, for middle class liberals, closet Sanghis, and much else. But, once again, disgust for myself is a little more difficult to negotiate or be proud of.

The first realisation is that these binaries between the self and the world are false and untenable. I am made of both the world and myself and the world is also made up of me. Jacqueline Rose says that suffering beyond endurance does not lessen the enchantment of the world. Every day, I attempt once again to let my mother go. I do not let go of the hatred of what was done to her: by my father, my grandmother, her brother, my brother and so many more people. Every day, as I attempt to understand a Sanghi or a Jaat man from Haryana (both subjects of my research), I also attempt to understand a bit of myself even as I excuse neither the Sanghi nor the Jaat nor myself of any of what is truly hateful about all three of us.

Every new day, my boyfriend gets better at accepting me for who I am and my self-hatred decreases a little. Every day, I read wise words from feminists and imaginatively enter the protocols of my mother’s life in an attempt to understand her as I let her go.

Hatred and disgust have their place in the world. Hatred and disgust for the external is easy; for the internal, it requires recognition, assessment, small moves. Both only increase understanding and, ultimately, the enchantment of the world.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Between Hatred & Enchantment")