Stranded on the Space Mountains of Self-Loathing

I didn’t think I had issues with self-loathing. I felt pretty confident, and I’d heard that I seemed self-assured and self-possessed. I just thought it was normal that every day, multiple times a day, I thought of a shameful incident in my past and grunted or made an odd squeaking noise. It didn’t feel at all strange to me that I’d created a private collection of humiliations from my past, like a bracelet of beads studded with little razors. It didn’t strike me as suspicious that I tended to feel these pangs shortly after I did something was proud of, or accomplished something efficiently, as if I had to pay some cost for doing well, as if I had to remember my real station in life whenever current events might convince me I was praiseworthy. It didn’t feel odd to me, before, that I was very insistent on adhering to a self-image, but was never sure of what that self-image was. I was always finding new ways to evaluate myself every season, creating new, bizarre conceptions of what I ough

I didn’t think I had issues with self-loathing. I felt pretty confident, and I’d heard that I seemed self-assured and self-possessed. I just thought it was normal that every day, multiple times a day, I thought of a shameful incident in my past and grunted or made an odd squeaking noise. It didn’t feel at all strange to me that I’d created a private collection of humiliations from my past, like a bracelet of beads studded with little razors. It didn’t strike me as suspicious that I tended to feel these pangs shortly after I did something was proud of, or accomplished something efficiently, as