I guess the topic here is dealing with self-hatred that was created via decades of abuse. I have an appointment with my therapist tomorrow, and this is going to be my starting point with her.
I was a genuinely unlikable child by both peers and adults and it was made clear to me my entire life, and my mom seemed to hate me more than anyone. I was 200 pounds by the age of 9 and a genuinely ugly kid. Adults, my mom, and peers would constantly tell me how fat and ugly I was. It didn’t help that until high school I was always the tallest, biggest person in the school, redhead, covered in freckles, frizzy curly hair that looked like orphan Annie.
My peers would almost never say anything directly to me, but I was shunned and on occasions when there would be no empty spaces to sit at lunch, I would politely ask random people if I could sit at there table and dozens of times be met with nothing more than “ew” and then being ignored. I went to a different school almost every year, so this treatment was consistent.
I was then, and am now, a kind and sensitive person but I’ve always been incredibly awkward and have unintentionally offended many people over my life. One specific example is that I was born and lived in California for the first 10 years of my life and at 11 moved to Ohio. I was 13 and there was a group of about a dozen adults talking and one lady mentioned she had never been outside of Ohio. I asked, “so you’ve never been to California?” I meant nothing by it, I was literally just trying to be part of the conversation, but as a stunted 13 year old, I fully lacked the capacity to understand that my lived experience wasn’t the same as everyone else. A man there started sarcastically asking me, “have you been to Ireland because I have. Have you been to England? Holland? Germany?” He went on and on and was raising his voice and got so close to my face that I could feel the spit flying out of his mouth and onto my face as he kept talking. I was just standing there sobbing and no one stopped him until a few minutes later and as I started to walk off he called me “a spoiled little bitch trying to make people feel bad.”
The worst part about that is it was about one month after I had been locked in the bunk of a semi truck for four months straight traveling all over the US with my meth head mom and her boyfriend. I only got to go outside about once a week and had to pee and poo in plastic bags in a small trash can. It had been four months of almost no human contact even though they were less than 6’ away from me at all times behind a zippered vinyl curtain. It was over a year from that time before I even made a single friend and I went to two middle schools that year and was completely isolated during every day of my home and school life.
My mom also consistently terrorized me with beatings and just yelling at me about what a horrible and ugly person I was. There are so many things she’s done to me, but one from the age of 13 was her chasing me around the house and then tackling me when I tried to hide in my closet and sitting on top of me while popping pimples on my face and screaming at me about how fat and nasty I was.
I’m almost 40 now, and strangers regularly compliment my hair, my style, just tell me I’m beautiful overall. Like genuine consistent compliments everywhere I go, but I’m terrified of people. I have friends, a husband, I’m friendly with the neighbors, but more often than not it’s agony to socialize because I’m so paranoid about being mistreated or shunned. I’m also still extremely awkward, and even though most people say they don’t see it, I for sure have moments even now where I really do say something out of the left field that makes everyone quiet and feel awkward.