Little Haters and Finessing the Fuck You

Dropped these two Jay Smooth videos--which I revisit over and over and over--to my friend, Notblueatall, who's in a writing funk...and it made me realize two things:

ONE. I really needed to listen to this again, cuz damn does it ever apply to me. It's a process, y'all.

TWO. Jay Smooth finesses the hell out of the fuck you in these two videos.

The spiral that he talks about is what I would call a 'fuck me' spiral, where our behavior just isn't working for us, where we set traps for ourselves...and we need to acknowledge that in order to pull out. Little hater, the fuck me, it's all the same.

If you've found yourself falling into your own traps lately, watch:

Beating the Little Hater


And then follow it up with Jay, doing like we do, finessing the fuck you, singing:

Ballad of the Little Hater

But I'ma get where I need to be
Cuz I know someone out there believes in me
And I swear, I swear
My little hater won't win today

Fuck you, little hater, fuck you.

When Our Impulse to Control is What's Fucking Us

I have a pretty strong impulse not to cry. Now, I can cry if I'm watching a sad movie or a moving TED clip or if I read a profound or touching blog post. No problem. But I almost never cry because I need to cry...for me.

Even after all the times my father told me that it was okay to cry, I strongly resist crying around other people. But it's more than that. Even if I'm alone, I don't usually cry. I often don't realize I need to or it doesn't occur to me that I am resisting the need to cry...and draining myself of even more energy in the process.

I tell other people it's okay to cry. I acknowledge that sometimes they just need a good cry. I have encouraged friends to cry when they need to and seen the benefits they reap from processing that emotional energy through tears. But only recently have I begun to fully acknowledge that crying can be beneficial for me.

My aversion to crying isn't just about weakness or my obsession with being "independent," it's about not feeling out of control. As a kid with manic depression who sometimes had severe anxiety attacks, I have experienced uncontrollable crying that was literally a painful experience resulting in hyperventilation. I remember the embarrassment of being unable to calm down. I remember the pain in my chest, in my face, in my whole body, and the headaches afterward.

In contrast, I have also experienced the pain of holding in tears and sadness, or crying as silently as possible. Holding in tears, though painful, made me feel powerful. I could control whether or not people knew my pain, I could make sure it wasn't exposed. Part of what got me through at times was relishing my ability to hide my pain from everyone. I had the wherewithal to push through, wipe tears, smile in people's faces. I have long taken pride in the fact that I could hide my pain from others. It was an accomplishment, and I felt in control. But much like the sense of control and accomplishment anorexics feel from self-denial, it was false and it was harmful.

There might have been some people in my life who I successfully put one over on--my sense of pride in my hiding abilities was not unfounded--but there are many people, then and now, who have seen right through me when I tried to act as though everything is okay. When I am stressed or off or irritable or sad, the people around me who love me generally know it.

And with that I have been forced to relinquish, to some extent, this fictitious control. I am forced to name it as fiction even as I still desperately cling to it.

For most of my life I have worked diligently at this fiction because being vulnerable was my greatest fear. Just thinking about feeling vulnerable makes me feel like I'm going to have another one of those anxiety attacks.

But the tools I have used to protect myself have also kept me from connecting with other people, from building a deep trust, from seeking help when I needed it most. And the practice and pride I've built on hiding my pain away has become my intuitive way of interacting with the world. In other words, I have to actively work against my deep impulse to hide my pain, I have to work to realize I need other people's help, I have to push past the intense and embodied fear I have when I even think about letting myself be vulnerable. When you can't control and impulse, it's controlling you.

I'm getting there. It's about a happy medium. If try to control my impulse against vulnerability, that could end up being another thing that controls me. We need to realize it's not about control, it's about letting go. We need to find a happy medium, and perhaps I'll start with crying.

I cried the other day, stressed as I was, and it was exactly what I needed. It alleviated my stress, my irritation, my fear, and all the anxious feelings I was having. And it didn't explode into some anxiety attack or heave me into the terrible throws of a dark depression. I cried, and I cried hard, and it all passed. I didn't need to control it or stifle it. I was just making more (emotional) work for myself.

Here's to baby steps, and once again, to learning how not to fuck yourself over. Let's get out of our own fucking way.
________

This post is dedicated to Charlie at Mind Unquiet, who's touching honesty and willingness to be vulnerable in the process is something I deeply admire.

Fuck You 2.0

Well, friends, I did not expect to be telling you this story. This is a 'fuck you' epiphany and the only way to describe it is to say that it came upon me, which sounds a bit religious, but it's really only neural.

Something in my mind clicked, and suddenly everything shifted in succession...it was like a pattern of carefully laid dominoes had been disturbed, and having been disturbed, took their course unrestrained. My neural pathways were ablaze as I reflected back on my actions and saw them in a completely new light...like being at the end of the movie, realizing Bruce Willis is a ghost, and re-thinking everything you've seen.

It was one of those nights where I lay in bed contemplating, contemplating, contemplating. It's left over manic depression, for all I know. I was reflecting on the outlandishness that is my life, the ridiculous thing it is that I am where I am now. And it was a little melancholy, if I'm telling the truth...but let's get to the point.

Just then I got caught up in part of the storyline. I revisited some hateful feelings toward someone, a friend of a friend who has tried to add me on Facebook a few times. I laid there, feeling justified in my hatred for this person. I went over the reasons I didn't like her, perhaps to prove to myself that she deserved my scorn and resentment. It made me feel better. I reveled in my resentment. I had been so good to her and she so shitty to me and people I knew, not to mention such a negative influence on someone I loved. In fact, in my mind, this person took one of my best friends away from me. (It's not really true, and I had to argue that with myself for a while to justify that feeling despite my better judgment of reality.)

This led me to think of another person whose Facebook friend request I had rejected. This was a person I cared for a great deal, who I felt had disrespected me and disregarded our friendship, and who I'd not had contact with from that time on--after all, it was she who should've contacted me. I'd had a lot of time to formulate the story in my head. I cared about her so; I worried so; and she didn't even have the courtesy to give me one phone call. I had built up a well-reasoned resentment. After all, I never got a phone call. I never got an apology. How could someone disregard how much people cared for them? How much people were willing to do for them? And then out of the blue send me a friend request with no message attached, like nothing had happened? No, I was not about to let it go. I had so much pent up anger. I could have just rejected the request. But how could I not take this opportunity to tell her how I felt? To explain to her how much she hurt me and where she went wrong and how dare she try to make contact with me like none of that had ever happened? Her fuck you is due, I thought.

Have you sniffed out the self-righteousness yet? Boy howdy.

What I realized, amidst this magical, paradigm-shifting reflection, was that I felt like shit. I had thought that e-mail would give me closure. I would get it off my chest. I would let her know how I felt, how much I cared, and how much she let me down. But every time I had thought of her since, I felt terrible, not better.

There are times I can be really nasty if I feel it is justified, and I have never liked that in myself. I had recognized this nastiness in other areas and times in my life; times where I made people feel like shit--people I cared about, like my father or my mother. In those situations, I lashed out because I felt threatened, and sought 'victory' by making the other person feel stupid or ashamed. It's the worst kind of 'fuck you' and it's unproductive. But there are lots of situations in my life where I have justified for these fuck yous, like this letter to my former friend and the resentment I just couldn't let go. Hindsight is 20-20 and all that.

I started to realize that the way I had acted, the things I had said, were not productive. The fuck you I thought had unburdened me had marked me. Another 'fuck you' that was really a 'fuck me.'

But these fuck yous always felt so justified. It didn't feel like hatefulness. It felt self-righteous...but not the kind of self-righteous where you know your self-righteous and you can call yourself on it, the kind of self-righteousness where you do really feel superior. If you are superior, if you are right, what's to question? When it comes down to it, the self-righteousness is just a cover for the hatefulness. And I never had to reflect on these fuck yous, except to remind myself how fucking RIGHT I had been, how right I was to stand up for myself, etc.

This is why self-righteousness is fucking dangerous, folks. Self-righteousness is the reason for so much violence and hatred. Self-righteousness is the only thing that explains the ridiculous actions and tireless hatred of the Westboro Baptist Church. They may be hateful, but they do what they do because they feel justified...their self-righteousness tells them so. Self-righteousness enables inhuman behavior. Self-righteousness is to dehumanization what privilege is to oppression. It's the other side of the coin, folks.

These realizations, of course, led to rapid reflection on all my hatefulness, all my resentment. And let's face it, I have my fucking fair share. My father always told me that if you didn't forgive people, it hurt you more than it did them. And I think that's right, cuz you're the one holding the baggage at the end of the day...and you only make it denser and heavier over time. I'm not saying resentment and hatred doesn't sometimes serve a function for us. But sometimes what starts out as function becomes dysfunction.

To be honest, I take hurting other people pretty hard. I don't like it. It's why I avoid conflict and have the nasty habit of putting the perceived needs of others over my own much of the time. I once accidentally hit a girl with a jump rope at recess and the emotions of guilt and self-punishment are so strong now that I feel a flash just thinking about it. I'm getting better at realizing that sometimes you hurt people or put them off and that's life. But even as a child I never could understand why someone would hurt someone else intentionally. Every now and then my father recalls a time when I asked him why people hurt each other.

So naturally, when I started to see how I'd done others wrong with my hatefulness, I decided wanted to correct this pattern. I have already written two apology letters to former friends, including the friend mentioned above. Unlike my schoolchildself, though, I'm not beating myself up about it terribly. Goodness knows I don't need another fuck me. I've just resolved to admit these things to myself, work them out where needed, and think more self-reflexively in times where I feel a little to justified in my anger, times when I'm stewing in my resentment, times where I feel self-righteous.

Part of not beating myself up about it is thinking, again, about times where this fuck you attitude did work for me. It was perhaps the same self-righteousness that led me to challenge adults' abuse or misuse of authority when I was younger. It's that same self-righteousness--or an element of it--that gets me fired up and angry and makes me an asskicker when I see social injustice. These things can be good, but the fuck you must be tempered by a sense of love and a wish to strive for human connection and healing, rather than perpetuating hatred or tearing down or dehumanizing others. 

I'm not quite sure what this means for my life as a whole yet, but it's one more step to weeding out my fuck me behaviors. Or you might think of it as honing the fuck you. Yes, that's Fuck You 2.0.

When the Fuck You is Really Fuck Me: The Candy Bar Rebellion

I'm kind of a pro at being self-reflexive, thinking about my thinking, analyzing my own psyche. In fact, I'm self-reflective to a fault at times. One might think that, this being the case, I'd have it all figured out--but it just ain't so.

One day awhile back my therapist and I were discussing the fuck you. I was milling over something, but she pointed out that it's a strategy that often really works for me. And I sort of had a shift in consciousness right then and there. I owned the fuck you, and she let me. It was beautiful. I think it was right then that this whole 'fuck you paradigm'--fuck you as a flexible and useful metaphor for my life/behavior/attitude/etc.--came to life.

I realized that the reason I use certain strategies is that they do often work for me, or at least they are functional in some way, which is why I use those strategies in the fucking first place. Sometimes it's simple things like that which are elusive to hyper-intellectual hyper-reflective gals like myself.

After this realization, I decided to try to be more cognizant about what works for me and what doesn't and in what situations. Because you know what? It fucking sucks when it (whatever 'it' is) doesn't work for you. And if that behavior or way of thinking is reinforced by your success in the 100 other situations in which it does work, you might have a little blind spot and find that unknowingly you are desperately trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It really is about paradigm shifts, y'all. Here's the rub: Find a new theory for square pegs, for they are not round...idiot.

Really, we're not idiots, we're human, but we just have to realize our theory (about how to think/behave/etc.) is not a universal theory for our existence.

And here's where my blogs collide, because my first 'fuck me' realization was about food.

There's a reason I hadn't talked about food with my therapist. In fact, it's the reason that I've resisted being as self-reflective about food as I might normally be--which does not mean I haven't thought a good deal about it, considering, well, my analytic ways. 

I'm fat, y'all. And when you put food and fat in the same conversation, there are lots of assumptions--dominant paradigms, if you will, about food and fat people. While my therapist seemed pretty hip to my fat activism, these dominant ideas about food and fat people are pretty deep in our cultural and personal consciousnesses. They are hard to root out, even if you're trying.

But she broached it. And I didn't say, "Fuck you." I didn't put the kabash on the subject because A) I trust this gal a good deal by now and B) it's a subject I've admittedly left unexamined and didn't think it was completely unwarranted to examine it. As I told her, I don't know anyone who doesn't experience a disordered relationship with food, a lot or at least some times. I have. I do. But going there with someone you're not sure you can trust can feel like dangerous territory, quite frankly, because it's easy to pigeonhole fat people.

Let's check off some of the assumptions:
-All fat people eat too much. It's why they're fat, duh!
-Fat people cannot control themselves when it comes to food, especially food that is not good for them. (For example, the stereotype is not that fat people sit on the couch eating carrots all day.)
-Fat people eat to: find comfort, because they are super sad, to replace love/to feel loved, to replace sexual pleasure, to protect themselves from sex, because they have a mental disorder (i.e., fat people are pathological eaters)
-Fat people lie about they eat. You can't believe a word they say about food.
-When no one's looking, fat people gorge themselves...which leads us to
-All fat people are binge eaters
-If fat people just "ate right" an "exercised" they would be thin

This isn't even an exhaustive list, so as you can see, it's a fuckin' minefield. Because the truth is, that while those things may be true about some fat people or some fat person out there, they are not true about ALL fat people. And they are certainly true for a lot of people who are not fat. While there are numerous studies I could cite, rebuffing fat myths is not what this post is really about. So for the time being, if you're experiencing shock and awe at the idea that those stereotypes aren't actually The Truth, I'll point you here, here, here and here. Even if you disagree, you should still be able to take a breath and see where I'm going with this characteristically long post. Let's not get sidetracked.

After that conversation, I started consciously trying to be more self-reflexive about food. One night, a little late, I found myself wanting to eat a candy bar, as we had some mini-candy bars lying about. And this is precisely why fat people in particular, and people in general, have such a fucked up relationship with food. My first instinct was to feel bad for wanting it. I knew I was about to go right to bed. Eating a candy bar this late seemed sinful. Thus, I entered the mental universe where food is moral; and wanting a candy bar late at night was amoral. This is how we are taught to feel and this is why EVERY DAMN ONE OF US has a fucked up relationship with food built into their pyche.

Here is where my fuck you instinct kicked in. I realized I was making this moral judgment, and I decided to reject it. I thought about whether I really wanted the candy bar, and I fucking did want it. I didn't want to gorge on a million candy bars. I wanted one mini-fucking-candy bar. That's all. I decided I would eat that mother fucker and not feel guilty about it. I had stopped to think. I knew I didn't need the candy bar, that the sugar might disrupt my sleep a little, but I wanted it. And I made a conscious decision to go ahead.

I thought I had really processed through these fucked up food feelings. I was wrong. I ate the candy bar, and I sat there. I felt compelled to eat another. I felt terrible about it. Then I ripped that mother fucker open and chomped that shit in one fell swoop.

I sat there a bit more. "Why the fuck did I eat that second candy bar? I didn't want another candy bar." Now my stomach was upset. It also certainly wasn't the best plan of action to eat two candy bars, mini or not, right before trying to get a good night's sleep. "Why did I feel compelled to eat that shit when it was contrary to what I wanted to do and feel? "

Rebellion. Fuck you. That second candy bar was my fuck you. I thought I had dealt with the food guilt, but I hadn't. I ate the first candy bar and despite my damnedest effort, I could not escape the guilt that I have been trained to feel. I don't like that fucking guilt. It doesn't feel good. (Just as an aside: Studies show body shame decreases healthy behaviors. This is a prime example.)

It's some bullshit that I've gotten the message--as have many others--that eating a candy bar means I'm a bad person. But I felt like a bad person. And my reaction was typical for me. I rebelled. I wanted to say "FUCK YOU" to that guilt.


"Oh, I can't eat a candy bar? I have to feel bad about eating it? Mother fucker, I'll eat another just to show you what I can and cannot do." *rip* *chomp*

The Candy Bar Rebellion didn't do a damn thing for me. Fuck you was not the appropriate tactic. It was the fuck you turned inward. I was battling a voice inside my head, the memory of every food shame moment ever in my lifetime.

Comedienne Jen Kober once put a video of herself eating a candy bar on YouTube to say, "Fuck you, I'm fat and I'll eat a god damn candy bar--and I'll be funny while doing it." (It's no longer available, sadly). But this was not that. The fuck you was really a fuck me, the action directed back at myself rather than at the world which has made my relationship with food, at times, fucked up.

What this means is that my fuck you instinct is strong. That's not a bad thing in and of itself. As my therapist said, I finesse that shit and it often works for me. Rebellion is kind of my thing. I'm fine with that. But rebellion is not appropriate for all situations, and ideally, it should be pointed in the right direction. The fuck you only really works if you're not fucking yourself in the process.