Trigger/Content Warning: Brief discussion of depression and intrusive thoughts.
For my weekly column for Cystic Fibrosis News Today going live tomorrow, I wrote about body dysmorphia and how much I’ve struggled — as a man and person with CF — with body image issues and dysmorphia for a very long time. I needed to write a bit more about this without the handling of an editor so I could write a bit more stream-of-consciously on the subject.
In my column I discuss how I committed to loving myself through a process of recognizing that my body is the only body I have and because I love life so much, I have to learn how to love the vessel that I traverse life in — aka my body. This process of learning to love my body has been less painful for me than it has probably been for others. The thing about struggles is that there is often no good in comparing them; we should spend more time recognizing that the broader concept of struggle, no matter the type directly impacting us, is an experience that unites more than it divides. Whether your struggle is cancer, cystic fibrosis, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, body dysmorphia, financial struggles, relationship troubles, familial relationships, or whatever else: Our struggle is more similar than it is different. The reality is that our struggle has hurt us and made us feel less than and it has impacted how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. While there may be gradients to struggles, we do ourselves no favors by undermining what others are going through. Instead, we should strive to be empathetic and to understand what others are going through so we can potentially share our wisdom or even just stay quiet and be a shoulder to cry on or a sounding board. We are better off when we are there for one another.
My personal journey to recognizing these valuable lessons has been marked by many detours. I’ve gone from hating myself to wanting to hate others for not having experienced what I’ve experienced to hating myself from a different angle where I hated my callousness for wanting to hate others to apathy and cynicism. All the while, I had this itch, this persistent reminder in the back of my head to pursue optimism and compassion. In the worst moments of my life and my resentment, I had this spark of desire to be optimistic. The spark, almost always nearly but not fully extinguished by cynicism and the self-destructive belief that I needed to feel shame to become wiser, smoldered through it all, hanging out in the back of mind, patiently waiting to become a roaring guiding light.
I had a hard time grasping how it could be possible for me to juggle so many apparently contradictory ideas in my mind; depressed to the point of suicidal ideation, optimistic for a future, and both apathetic, excited, and terrified of life after death. I read articles about shame and death, books about the universe, fortune cookies; I watched videos, movies, shows that explored death and dying. Nearly every moment I spent driving or walking or working out or with friends I would either be wondering what the fuck this was all for, and for those few and far between blissful moments where I escaped my own mind, I would immediately fall back into wondering about what the point of it all of it is as soon as those moments came to an end.
What I eventually began to recognize was that through every single moment — the worst, the best, the in-between — there was only one thing in common across them all: myself. I had only myself there for me in whenever I felt the most pure joys and the most malignant miseries. Rarely was I ever the cause of those joys or miseries, but the point was that I experienced them. It seems strange to make a differentiation of our bodies and our minds, but I think they are often at odds, or probably worse, we perceive them to be at odds. Our mind denigrates our body and our body has no choice but to accept it and as we denigrate our bodies through words, we begin to denigrate our bodies by over-conditioning through exercise, over-eating, eating unhealthily, coping unhealthily, or whatever else. This vicious cycle leaves us going between our bodies and our minds while occupying them both, never to sit back and recognize that this resentment will commit us to a fatal path — either in mortality or prolonged misery. It is unsustainable, and it’s really un-fucking-fair to ourselves. We must overcome.
I have never once accomplished anything in my life entirely on my own. Neither have you. This is not an indictment of your or my skills or discipline or capabilities; rather, it is a testament to how we need one another and how there’s no sustainable path we can take entirely on our own. This is not a bad thing! It’s better to recognize how we need others and how others need us instead of pretend that we have achieved on our own without anybody else’s assistance. For me, I have had people there for me every single day I have been alive. That support has never gone unnoticed or unappreciated. I have had people support my endeavors and, possibly most importantly, I have had people that I love more than life itself be there to say they believed in me. I have had opportunities and I have had teachers tell me they believe in me and give me the boost and support I’ve needed to believe in myself. This support from others has given me meaning in life and it has helped me from falling victim to my own worst impulses and fears. What do I stand to gain by pretending an alternative reality? What do any of us stand to gain by looking out only for ourselves?
Most people would not argue that we should not treat others well. And then, there’s that ole dictum: Treat others how you want to be treated. It was in thinking about this that my mind finally processed a broken line of code in my thinking: I tried to navigate life treating others as well as possible while grounding myself into a metaphorical dust through self-loathing language. It occurred to me that this disdain of myself was leading me to look in the mirror and feel physical revulsion at the reflection in the mirror. I stopped perceiving myself as an occupier of the world and instead the antagonist of the universe; undeserving of any good and more than deserving of all bad. I remember one night rationalizing to myself the darkest vision imaginable: This world would be better without me, and the morally correct thing to do is to bring about that world. I’ve written about this “logical” sort of suicidal ideation and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever admitted about myself or my depression. It sounds both childish and nihilistic but the hard truth is that it’s real, it’s valid, and I’m willing to bet somebody else out there, maybe even a reader of this very blog post, has experienced this darkness. I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody to reach that stage.
But I — my body and my mind — came out of it. I didn’t leave that phase of my life unscathed and I certainly haven’t “beaten” body dysmorphia, self- and body-image issues, depression, or anxiety but I have absolutely come out of that phase which a gentler, more graceful, and compassionate view of myself. Maybe the most important lesson I’m learning is a sense of radical compassion and kindness towards myself. There is almost never going to be a time where hating ourselves is the ticket to a better life. We are better off learning how to love ourselves despite our biggest issues and learning how to leverage that love for to become better and continue growing. It takes radical compassion and kindness for us to believe in a better world. We will never become the people we want to be if we are revolted by the sight or thought of ourselves. We will only become our best selves by looking at ourselves, being honest about how we can be better, and then striving to achieve this future better version.
It took way too many years for me to realize that I could love myself. I had plenty of others tell me that I could but I needed to believe it myself. I hope you’re able to believe it sooner than I did. And if you ever need some help, I assure you you have people including this very writer there for you to remind you that it’s okay to be graceful with the one thing that’s been there with you through it all.
tré