The Alchemy of Regret

On a dissection.

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There is nothing more tedious than self-loathing.

It’s just so damned boring. And I have impatience with myself because when I see it in other women, I think:

Stop. Just stop. Stop slumping in defeat. Stop hanging your head. Sit up straight and let the world know you’re here and you count. Stop feeding into the industries and systems that want you to hate yourself. Our self-hatred is big business. They make fortunes off us feeling like this. And if you are learning to hate yourself in church, find a different church. If there’s a higher being, there is no way it wants you to hate yourself.

I mean really, is the role of women on earth solely to feel shame and breastfeed? I think not.

That’s what I think when I see it in other women. But when I feel it, I’ve historically just fed into it, listened to it, slumped, and wondered why I take up space on the planet. My shoulders are rounded.

Do as I say, not as I do.

I think it very dangerous and not in good taste to speak of myself in the third person, to say nothing of making up names for aspects of my personality. But lately, I must admit I’ve been calling my inner critical voice “Little Tyrant.”

Little Tyrant wakes up before I do. Little Tyrant is smoking a cigarette, on her second cup of coffee, before I open my eyes.

Little Tyrant oversees self-loathing. She has a never-ending list of my faults and reasons to despair and give up.

I am of the firm belief there’s a payoff to everything. So—

What is the payoff to my self-loathing? What am I getting from Little Tyrant?

Maybe if I hate myself enough, I keep my mother alive. Maybe if I hate myself enough, I’ll protect myself from disappointment. Maybe if I hate myself enough, I won’t get too big, I won’t be visible.

If I’m invisible, it’s very difficult to put a target on my back. Invisibility protects me from the rest of you.

On a very good day—a day when I have perspective—I’m able to soothe myself with these thoughts:

Look. You’ll be dead in 30, 35 years, max. Nothing is a big deal, because you’re entering the last phase of your life. When you’re dead, nothing anyone says will bother you. Plus, you’re on this little bit of rock in a great big universe. Perspective, please. There are billions of people much worse off than you.

Then I calm down, and write the next sentence, or paragraph, that comes to me. I try to write it without worrying about how it reads.

Over the past five years, I’ve developed practices to eradicate Little Tyrant, and they’re working. I try to nip its voice in the bud. Then I carry on with the day.

I’m having some success. The time periods I spend in self-loathing are shorter. I don’t want to live that way anymore. It’s ridiculous.

And if I look honestly at what I’ve accomplished in recent years, I’m functioning at a very high level. Certainly, I’m functioning better than ever before.

But I’ve been hating myself for fifty years. It’s not undone overnight. What I’ve learned is that no matter what I think, carry on. Not feeling like working or telling myself everything I write is crap are not excuses to dawdle.

I write anyway. When I get clinical about myself—when I observe from a place of non-judgment—I know I’m doing well.

During this five-year period, I’ve been writing a memoir. And something has been gnawing at me. The closer I get to finishing, the more menacing the feeling.

It’s about an inability to finish the book.

I’ve finished drafts many times, but this time I know it’s the end, because my editor said,

“After this, the book is done.”

Oh dear.

I’ve found the last couple of weeks excruciating. There has been something inside me growing darker and darker.

And the feeling, or suspicion I’ve had, is all the work I’ve done is for naught.

I am genetically predisposed to shoot myself in the foot, and I will find that despite all the therapy and mediating and walking, the book will not be finished.

Because not finishing is what I do.

But that’s not true anymore. I do finish things. And the problem wasn’t so much finishing the book. It was that to finish the book, I had to write about Henry.

At issue is a chapter I need to add about Henry, who worked for my grandparents as a butler.

I knew if I wrote this chapter the right way, it would reveal something truly terrible. Perhaps because I knew this, it became critically important to do properly.

I’ve been hacking away at it for years, and the chapter is worthless every time. I could never find a way in that worked. What if I can’t get Henry’s chapter written?                   

I’ll have to write it anyway. It’ll just be a bad chapter. But I won’t be at all satisfied, because Henry deserves the best of me.

Originally the deadline for finishing was September 15^th. But I had to evict a nightmare tenant and couldn’t work. I told the wonderful editor I hired it would now be October 1^st.

You don’t get to delay a deadline twice. Not in my book.

Last week, we had a huge family wedding. I was granted a reprieve from worrying about the chapter, because I couldn’t possibly do the book and the wedding.

Finally, the day came where I could work again.

But alas, I had to get my car inspected. That took up most of Tuesday. By then, it was afternoon.

I can’t write in the afternoon. I did start watching re-runs of Downton Abbey, though. I had time for that. The irony that I chose Downton Abbey is not lost on me; as I read recently, it’s a “Tory fantasy.”

The book isn’t getting finished. I told you so.

Then I remembered last month.

We went away to the Hamptons, and I had a good three days of work while in someone else’s house. I felt a rare freedom to work all day.

None of the daily living chores taunt me when I’m elsewhere.  I don’t worry about dust on the floor when it isn’t mine.

I had a brilliant idea.

I’d check into a hotel. In a hotel I won’t be distracted by picking up dishes, filling Soda Stream bottles, doing laundry, or cooking dinner.

I text my friend Raff.

“I’m checking into a hotel to finish this,” I wrote.

Then I told Secret Service. He pouted, but this made me even more determined to leave.

He said,

“I’ll help. You don’t have to check into a hotel. I’ll leave you alone and do all the house stuff.”

This did not sound as fun as checking into a hotel. But it did sound less expensive. So I decided I’d give it a day, and see if it worked.

He was true to his word. He cleaned the kitchen, even the pots and pans. He wiped down the countertops. He did the laundry. He removed from the table the detritus I collect when writing: teacups, espresso cups, empty water bottles, little grape vines.

I started to empty the dishwasher when I was in the kitchen. He said,

“Don’t do that. I’ll do it. You write.”

I started to feel warm inside. I started to feel important.

When I was little and at my grandparent’s house, people waited on me. I liked it.

But when my mother drove us home the two miles which separated her parent’s house from ours, a different reality awaited. There were no servants at our house. And sometimes, we were cold. We didn’t have central heating. In winter I could see my breath in the hall.

I never knew if we were rich or poor because we grew up both.

The part of me that always wants to be waited on, who thinks I deserve to be waited on, never left me. I am someone who leans to the far left politically. But secretly, I want to be the Queen and treated as such.

A strange alchemy then took place.

Because Secret Service was waiting on me, I was able to connect to how I felt as a child at my grandparent’s. And because I was able to observe myself—as a child—I started to write about Henry from a clinical perspective.

How I grew up was beyond my control. But what I’ve done—and not done—about racism as an adult is something in my control.  How I failed Henry as an adult is the subject of the chapter. Somehow, I was able to keep the detachment as I wrote about myself as an adult.

I have a chapter now. I don’t know if it’s good but it’s honest.

All the racial ugliness in the south is something I’m committed to fighting. I’ve been aware of racial injustice since I was a small child, and always considered myself on the side of right.

I didn’t want to write about Henry because I didn’t want to reveal that ugliness in me. Every time, it failed as a piece of writing because it failed as a piece of truth.

If I wasn’t honest about Henry, my little self-satisfied life ends up being a sham. Who cares what I accomplish if I’m hiding the truth about myself? What is self-protection worth?

I am not certain how to frame the difference between self-loathing, which stops my productivity, and the kind of shame that help me change as a human. It seems mysterious.

But it might have something to do with dissection.

I had to clinically dissect the problem within. As a surgeon your mind can’t be distracted; one slip of the knife and you’re done.

If the same principle can be applied to our inner life—if we can evaluate ourselves surgically, without judgment—the truth can be revealed.

The chapter is written. I am no longer hiding this part of myself.

Weirdly, I think the difference between useless self-loathing and useful shame might be the absence of judgment.

When I judge myself, I feel self-loathing. But when I assess myself, it’s different. If I do an honest assessment, I have an opportunity to fix the problem.

It’s when I neglect to fix the problem that I feel shame. Shame lets me know there’s no evading the truth.

It was in me whether I wrote about it or not. Not writing about it never made it go away. I can hide from everyone, but there’s no hiding from myself.