When I am in that place, allowing all that shit to rain down on me, and when I take it thinking I deserve it, I begin to realize how little I value myself. I really don’t love myself. Why don’t I? I am starting to understand now how deeply I have internalized everything. How I have bought the label and swallowed it whole. Hating myself is so very easy. I doubt life starts out this way. We aren’t born hating ourselves. I think for me losing my mom, without explanation started this ball rolling. I blamed myself, since nobody was telling me otherwise. I started to hate myself. As the years passed it just sat there, never getting any better. If anything it grew worse. When I struggled, I had no farther to look than inward. You’re Useless, You’re Stupid. When the floor was falling out from under me in college, I got the, You’re gay, that’s what’s wrong with you. Now I had You’re Useless, You’re Stupid and You’re Gay. What an awful combination. The self loathing just grew and grew. I could not find a way to talk about it, I would not let anyone in. Once I was hospitalized, I got a new label. Early on I heard the doctors talking to my family. It was now Borderline Personality Disorder. She won’t have a stable life they told them, she will probably destroy any close relationships, and she will manipulate all of you endlessly. Now I really knew I was a useless piece of shit. There, now you are stupid, and gay, and crazy and you will destroy anything healthy that comes along. I took it, all of it, into my heart. At that point in time, if anything had happened, it was clearly my fault. I was the one that was so deeply fucked up and so very damaged. Maybe beyond help. The doctors said to my family, “commit her to a state facility, that is all you can do for her”. Somehow, in all this I agreed. I decided my life was over. It was my aunt that fought for me. She wouldn’t let that happen. It changed the course of my treatment, and probably saved my life. It didn’t much matter though, I had already internalized the label and all that it meant. It is still there to this day, hasn’t changed. Just a new name and a new code. It doesn’t take much to slip into that nasty thought process and to unleash all my hate. I don’t know how to overcome all that, or how to come to terms with why I learned to hate myself so very deeply. I do know that it is something that is critical to my moving forward and finally moving away from all the shit in my past and into my future. I know I have so much potential to grow and to change, if only I can convince myself I deserve it. I am not a patient, I am a person. A person with the capacity to have a full life, to experience joy and sorrow as everyone does. To be a person that can weather the highs and lows without blaming myself every step of the way. I need to convince myself I am not a useless, stupid, crazy piece of shit. Just a human like everyone else.