ALSO BY ANNELI RUFUS Stuck: Why We Can’t (or Won’t) Move On Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto The Farewell Chronicles: How We Really Respond to Death JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China penguin.com A Penguin Random House Company Copyright © 2014 by Anneli Rufus Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: [email protected]. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rufus, Anneli S. Unworthy : how to stop hating yourself / Anneli Rufus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-10161629-1 1. Self-esteem. I. Title. BF697.5.S46R876 2014 2013050137 158.1—dc23 Version_1 This book is for: MGR KNL Contents Also by Anneli Rufus Title Page Copyright Dedication INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1 You Were Not Born with Low Self-Esteem CHAPTER 2 All Your So-Called “Personality Flaws” Are Actually Just Clever Coping Mechanisms CHAPTER 3 The Ten Hidden Self-Esteem Booby Traps—and How to Dismantle Them CHAPTER 4 The Upside of Low Self-Esteem CHAPTER 5 What Works for You: Seven Healing Strategies CHAPTER 6 Healing Takes Time Notes Introduction The most terrible and violent of our own afflictions is to despise our own beings. —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE F or more than forty years, I hated myself unreservedly, as if it was required. Why? Was I a murderer? A thief? Had I committed genocide or bombed the Prado? Was I mean? Did I have seven swollen, scaly heads? Whose children had I thrown down wells? Which city did I plunder? Had I put soap in a swimming pool or slaughtered fawns? No. None of those. I hated myself because Mom hated herself and, meaning no harm, taught me how. Self-loathing spreads that way, from heart to heart and hand to hand. For decades, I avoided mirrors, called myself the worst words you can think of, skipped meals, and stared jealously at strangers, wishing I was anyone but me. Spectacles of my eighteen thousand days of hate. I’ve seen what self-loathing can do. I’ve seen it steal the light right out of eyes. I’ve watched it drive the beautiful, the brilliant, and the kind to places from which they could not come back. What if, instead of what actually happened on those days, I had drawn eighteen thousand portraits or learned eighteen thousand Estonian words? I would be fluent now! I would have a portfolio! What would you do today if you did not despise yourself? • • • Science tells us that no one is born with low self-esteem. Recent research suggests that some people are genetically more susceptible to develop low self- esteem at some point in life, just as some people are born more likely than most to sing well or go bald. But in this crowded, complex world, self-loathing can seize anyone at any moment. No one is immune. Five people I have known: On her first-ever ski trip, Cara teetered at the top of the bunny slope, took one tentative step, then fell face-first into the powder. Twice she struggled back to her feet, only to fall. Her fiancé and their friends offered encouragement, but Cara unlaced her ski boots, ran back to the lodge sobbing, and stayed in her room for the rest of the trip. Accepting his third annual Teacher of the Year award, Jeremy gazed out at an auditorium packed with wildly applauding children, parents, and colleagues. Silently he mourned: I was supposed to get my doctorate. I should be famous by now, not teaching fourth grade. I was supposed to have made earthshaking discoveries. It was expected of me. And I failed. Rachel held in her stomach as Mister Married Guy slid his hand under her blouse. Sexy eyes, murmured Mister Married Guy. Rachel laughed. My best feature. My only feature, compensating for this fat gut and these giant thighs. Mister Married Guy was not listening. Hours later, home again, Rachel hurled books at the wall while screaming, I wanna diiiiie. The boss rebuked Nate for his new designs: Clearly you lack the skills claimed on your résumé. Nate flinched, remembering what the neighborhood bullies used to say as they spat into his lunch. You’re right, Nate said. I suck. His coworkers gasped as Nate snatched his designs from the boss and tore them up, growling, I suck! Screw you! Screw everything! Handing the clerk her credit card, Alison hoped her new friend Skye would like the gift. Just as she hoped her sister had liked the Hermès scarf that Alison had sent her from Paris. And just as she hoped her son liked his new Air Jordans and private tennis lessons. Watching the clerk wrap Skye’s gift, a two-hundred- dollar designer handbag, Alison hoped it was enough. “I’ve always had really low self-esteem,” Mariah Carey said in an interview after having released eleven CDs, acted in five Hollywood films, and won more than two hundred music awards. “And I still do.” The weird thing about self-esteem is how little connection it bears to reality. Many burglars and murderers feel great about themselves. Yet many upstanding citizens whom a jury of sages would declare kind, wonderful, and worthy hate themselves. A silent epidemic grips the land. The afflicted include many whom you would least suspect, even the ones you think have everything, even some of the bravest and (in your eyes, but not theirs) the best. The hoary stereotypes of the person with low self-esteem as a timorous Woody Allen character, beaten wife, serial killer, or Dickensian waif are exactly that: hoary stereotypes. The real picture includes Cara, Jeremy, Rachel, Nate, Alison, Mariah, you, me, and who knows how many more of us, of every stripe. What are we doing here together, side by side? We share something. Not something you would notice right away. Not something we discuss or something you could touch. We dislike ourselves for no valid reason. Monitoring ourselves and regretting nearly every act, some of us even loathe ourselves. Despise ourselves. Call ourselves names you would not call a dog. We do this, or we did. We are six among multitudes. In this book I say we who hate ourselves in the present tense, although for me it is no longer eminently true, at least not all the time, at least not as it was. But we who hate ourselves was for so many years the only legion I had ever known. Its refrains remain in my mind forever fresh. If marching with my former legion can lead it to freedom, march with it I will. We who hate ourselves think we have huge flaws—ugliness, say, or sloppiness. We think these flaws legitimize our self-loathing. We focus on them with obsessive tunnel vision, which obscures our other, better qualities. We do not realize that our flaws—and who is flawless?—are not our big problem. Low self-esteem is. Imagine having little or no self-esteem when everyone expects you to have lots. Self-esteem is an industry these days, a given, the major religion of this era —yet we have little or none. Not in a good way, not as in some kind of ego- shedding Buddhist selflessness. It’s not as if we who hate ourselves have transcended self-esteem. I do not say all this in search of sympathy. I would rather not speak of self- esteem at all—mine, yours, or anyone’s. I would rather not have to. I would rather be invisible to you and/or discussing pearl-diving instead, or clairvoyance, or Thebes. But as long as this epidemic rages, driving the afflicted to curse, cut, and kill themselves, we need to talk. You have climbed this far. Despite everything, you have. You were the Child with Far to Go and you have come, helping others along the way. If you picked up a magic pebble on the beach and found that it could speak, that it possessed the power to describe you accurately, that its mission was to tell you what is good about you, okay about you, and not so good, and that it could not lie, what would it say? To casual observers, I look like a middle-size American with a middle-size, ordinary life. Casual observers do not know how many years I wasted on self- loathing, that school and work and relationships flashed past almost unseen as I faced forward, blind with fear, and backward, burning with regret. Casual observers do not know that self-loathing was really my career. We lost our self-esteem in sandboxes and swimming pools and sleazy bars. We lost it in attics and open fields. However you lost yours, most of us who hate ourselves display the same “tells”—the same habits, reactions, defenses, and coping skills: dead giveaways by which we can identify each other and which we can change—as we will see later in this book. Unlike others who are united in their suffering, we who hate ourselves tend to suffer in insular silence because we believe so ardently that we are bad and thus (a) no one wants to be around us, much less hear us mope, and (b) our badness gives us no choice but to hate ourselves. So what’s to say? We who hate ourselves think we do not deserve solidarity. Because self-loathing is the curse that dares not speak its name. Q. How does someone with low self-esteem screw in a lightbulb? A. However you want me to! Is this way okay? Is it? Really? No. It’s not. Totally not. Oh man. I can’t believe I screwed it in wrong, like I screw all lightbulbs in wrong. I screw everything in wrong. • • • Why should you slog through a whole book about self-loathing? A whole book about feeling miserable, anxious, and cursed? You shouldn’t. And that’s not this book. It might appear that way at first, but no: we are not here to whine (okay, maybe just a bit) but to work. This book is about setting down the weapons we use on ourselves—just for a minute at a time and shhh, no one need see—and pondering the possibility that they are not required, not justified, not right—and never were. That they were thrust into our arms by others long ago. That we are wielding them by accident, through deceit, by mistake. What if you heard a jingling sound at work one day and glanced under your desk to notice a ball and chain clamped to your ankle?