I completely hate myself! I hate everything about myself!

I am a complete failure!

Dear Mr. Tennis,

I completely hate myself. I hate everything about myself. I hate myself enormously. I hate everything I do, and everything I have ever done. I have never done anything that I am proud of. I am a complete failure. I know that I always will be a failure. People tell me that's irrational, that it's self-defeating, that I'm too hard on myself, et cetera. None of that matters, because it is monumentally true--as true as the Sun rising in the east every morning. 

All my life I have wanted to be a writer. I have no words. I am paralyzed, tongue-tied. I have never written anything in my life that I like, that has been any good at all. Before you say, what about school, what about the jobs you've had up till now, I have a job--a lucrative, prestigious job that on paper I am well-qualified for and that I ought to excel in and enjoy--that completely paralyzes me. 

Not long ago I changed jobs away from a place that I utterly detested, where I was actively failing every day, and my bosses told me so, to a place where the people are nicer but where I am utterly paralyzed, unable to do anything, and utterly baffled by what I ought to do. It is as if I asked you to live your life in a world that only speaks a completely foreign language, in a completely foreign language family. Every job I've ever had has been like this. 

I never finished graduate school. I passed all my courses with flying colors, except I needed to write four papers. I could never write more than a paragraph or two of them. It would be like asking you, an accomplished and talented man, to write something intelligent about a subject you've never heard of before today. Can you write something professionally significant about geological engineering? This is the obstacle I faced, and still face, every day. 

My undergraduate years were awful, too. Writing stood in the way of accomplishing anything worthwhile there, too.

I am 40 years old. My health won't last much longer. It's already worse than it should be. I don't want to live like this. I want to be normal, and be at least slightly successful. 

One of the many things that overwhelm me at my job is that I am a writer. I am completely tongue-tied. I have several important writing assignments that I do not understand, for which I cannot find a single word to say. If that were not enough, even if I found it easy, rather than insuperably difficult, I utterly hate all of it. It isn't like I work for a company or industry that I find morally objectionable; I just find what I have to do abhorrent. Write an essay about my company's achievements in the last year--it ought to be easy, it would be easy for any semi-decent writer, yet I find it as hard as climbing a mountain and I hate thinking about it and doing it so very, very much. This contributes to my hating myself, too.

The only reason I do not end my life is that my wife loves me and I would never want to hurt her. 

Sometimes I read people online trying to persuade people who want to die not to kill themselves by saying, "Just stop. Pause. Maybe tomorrow will be nicer." 

I would like nothing more than to stop. I would like to close the door of my flat and never talk to anyone besides my wife ever again. But it isn't possible. I can't lose my job. I'll never get another one, at least one that pays as well as the one I have. I have nothing against being a supermarket stocker. My wife doesn't want me to quit, though. And she's the only reason I keep going on. I know it's unkind for me to put this pressure on her. 

Before you suggest the obvious--go to a doctor and get medication--believe me, I have tried. I have seen a psychotherapist weekly for years. He thinks there's hope for me (I disagree). I have paid thousands for doctors to tell me to take medication that will make me fat, that will make it impossible to have sex, that will treat my depression by exacerbating my anxiety, that will make me less anxious by making me even sadder and more numb, et cetera, ad nauseam. Just today, a doctor hung up on me because I was directed to her to get medication for ADHD, after I paid a colleague in her practice many hundreds of dollars to administer a battery of tests, the outcome of which indicates that yes, I have ADHD. 

I am sorry for bothering you. I am really sorry to everyone. I honestly don't know how much longer I can go on. 

Hating Myself

Dear Hating Myself,

Seriously, I don't know how much longer you can go on either. But I must thank you. You have expressed what many of us feel, but few of us would admit. Not in such stark unrelenting terms anyway. You've really done it. You've laid it all out for us. That letter was like a solo performance. It's beautiful in its way, a beautiful portrait of despair.

But it's dangerous to walk around town in such a state. You might do something rash.

So I'm going to try to help you. I'm going to try to help you by arguing with you a little bit. First of all, these things you claim are "monumentally true--as true as the Sun rising in the east every morning": I think they are false. I think that's the whole problem. You have fallen victim to a host of false propositions cooked up by your brain. The reason they got cooked up is not important. Discovering the source of these false beliefs won't help anymore than discovering where the termites come from. The important thing is to get rid of the termites before they bring down the house.

I believe that you're a perfectly sane, rational and smart person who is under attack by your own brain. Again, why that happens I don't know. But I think I know how it can be cured because I myself was in such a state and I found a guy who told me to buy a book and do what it said in the book and I did like he told me and over the course of a couple of months I got better enough that I could move on. I still have to do the things the book says. But it's a little more automatic now.

So, my friend, you've spilled your guts and that took a lot of courage and so it's only fair that I also get honest and say that this column is going to come in two or three parts because I'm tired. I had a long day, my wife has a cold, and I’ve been driving the Italian freeway which can kind of wear you out.

And if I did finish this in one sitting it would be too long to read.

So let me say this for now. I believe you when you describe your condition. I believe that you really believe you are a failure. Just like I believed it when I went to the cognitive therapist and said, "I can't write. That's my problem."

Meanwhile, last year I became curious how many columns I had written in which I recommended the book I'm talking about, and the count came to fifteen. So I made a link and a web page listing all those columns and if you'd like to take a look at them, that'd be fine. And I'll tell the rest of the story over the next few days.

I'm keeping to the Thursday schedule, don't get me wrong. But this Thursday column will just come in two or three parts.

Hang in there! Don't do anything rash! Help is on the way!

[AND THIS IS THE END OF PART 1]—CT