I am selfish.
Though I suspect this is a universal condition, I can’t help but believe I’m more selfish than others. Every action, whether deliberate or instinctive, is *always* a result of self-interest. Even altruistic gestures are in self-regard. If a decision is ours to make, then whatever decision is made is made because it was, in some sense, wanted.
Recognizing this, though, does NOT absolve me. If anything, my belief in psychological egoism makes each of my decisions *more* inescapably mine. I get no comfort that others can, in believing my motives can be separated from what I want. If every action comes from some form of self-interest, then everything I do must also come from it too.
I’m afraid I’ll start making selfish-perceived decisions, knowing that no matter what I choose, I will be selfish anyway. I’m afraid people will see that all my perceived goodness was never selfless to begin with. I’m guilt-ridden that every choice I’ve made & every choice I make comes from self-interest. I’m guilt-ridden not because of that fact, but because I don’t care that my decisions are selfish, only that I am, & that I know it. I’m guilty because no matter what I can or will do is good. That I don’t do good because I can never be good.
Knowing that I act in my own interest doesn’t stop me from resenting others when their interest seem to be met more easily. Someone else’s existence always feels like a subtraction from my own.
I don’t know how to stop it. I’m the most jealous person I know. I’ve learned how to keep it discreet; people don’t believe me when I say “I have jealousy issues,” *because* I’ve learned to faux disinterest. But the smallest things make me feel physically ill; When someone repeats something I’ve said, when someone is born into more privilege than me, when someone I know directs their attention somewhere that isn’t me. It’s rarely dramatic, just moments that make my chest tight & myself nauseous.
Even worse, I don’t want to get better. I’m comfortable being jealous. I don’t feel guilty for it, I just feel sick when something triggers it. I don’t think someone like me could improve even if I tried anyway. I’m too curious to look away from the things that upset me. I’d rather know & feel awful than live in something resembling blissful ignorance. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but satisfaction will always brings it back.
I can’t stop checking, comparing, measuring myself against anyone or people I already know I resent.
There are people who hurt me years ago whose lives I still keep up with. Someone who practically “took” my interests now lives more comfortably than I ever have. Loved, supported, financially secure. Why did someone who has so much still feel the need to treat me so cruelly..? And still, I look. I see how much more beautiful they are, how much more unique they are, how much happier they are.
Others who once pushed me toward the worst parts of myself have gone on to reinvent themselves publicly, moral-farming & philosophy preaching. Now unwaveringly supported. They get to move on & what I do is measure my life against theirs. I’m disgusted by how much I want to know, & how unwilling I am to stop.
I must be addicted to feeling horrible about myself.
No matter how sick it makes me, I return to it. I chalk it up to “insatiable curiosity,” but that must be cope. There must be some quieter part of me that craves what follows. Comparing so meticulously, the drop in my stomach, the slow ache of coming up short.
Less like harm & more like habit. I don’t know whether to feel guilty for wanting it, or angry that I do.
I *must* be addicted to feeling horrible about myself. Every day; without fail, I think about my appearance for at least half the time I’m awake. It crowds out everything else. It’s selfish & it’s self-indulgent. But, I can’t stop. I’m grotesque & misassembled in ways I can’t correct. I’m so monstrous. I fit no beauty standard. A voice too deep, features that don’t align, none of my proportions match on my body, an unflattering personality. I feel guilty for thinking it, & guilty that I can’t think of anything else; but it is true. I am the ugliest girl I’ve ever known & ever will know.
I feel sick because I think about it so much & I feel sick because it’s true. People I know tell me it isn’t true. A countless number have. They insist I’m wrong. But I can’t stand a liar, & I hate it. It sounds like pity, or politeness. A lie I’m expected to accept in order to keep things comfortable. I get so angry at hearing it & that just makes me all the more disgusting.
I’m told there’s no evidence & that I’m inventing it. But appearance is everyone’s first impression. And, subconscious or not, will determine how you’re treated. I’ve felt it in the way I’m looked at, the way I’m spoken to, the way I’m made to feel excessive or inconvenient before I’ve said a word. Like I’m something less than human.
I’ve gone out of my way to stop complimenting people, I stopped saying “I love you,” I do everything in my power to not look in a mirror, yet I obsess over how to “fix” what I see. I try makeup, clothes, angles, lighting, nothing improves anything. Nothing alters the verdict. No amount of flattering fabric, no pigment, no reassurance will ever be strong enough to override my appearance. No amount of anything will make me look good to a populace. I look the same to myself, & I look the same to everyone else.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter to me, & that *I* truly don’t “care,” about my appearance. That if I seem preoccupied, it’s only because appearance dictates how people treat you. That I’m forced to care & look like I care, because the world cares first. But if I believe I’ll be treated like a burden regardless, then why does it still matter so much to me..? Why does it consume me if it’s already decided..?
As open as I seem now, it’s incredibly contradictory to me. For someone who claims to dislike herself this much, I spend an alarming amount of time writing about her. It feels contradictory, narcissistic, to center myself so deliberately, to keep saying “I,” “me,” “myself,” as if I’m something worth annotating. Yet, despite how exposed this may read, this blog is anything but vulnerable. I am the most open book out there.
I am still consumed by how unattractive I am. I feel guilty for the people who have to see me; my friends, my coworkers, even my family. No one should be subjected to the torture of being in the presence of my face. No one should be subjected to having to treat me like I’m normal. People who have to pretend I’m ordinary for the sake of kindness :(
I wish someone would throw acid in my face or cut me up, to sand down my features. Then I’d be all the more beautiful. I’d be so easy to look at.
I don’t deserve a single thing I have. Not anything physical, not any ability or skill, not even the conscience that allows me to recognize it. Despite this, I’m so grateful. Grateful for where I was born, for what I’ve been given, for the people who choose to stay near me. My gratitude doesn’t feel warm so much as it feels suffocating.
I’m hoarding something meant for someone better.
Every kindness is misplaced. Every good thing I have is delivered to the wrong person & I’ve just been too cowardly to return it. I carry it all with more guilt! Someone so horrible & so horrifically ugly shouldn’t be trusted with anything beautiful, least of all the things I’ve somehow managed to keep.
I am not myself anymore. Even if I deserved everything I have now, it still wouldn’t belong to *me*. I am not me. There is nothing I regret more than the change that brought me here. Not because change itself is wrong. Everything is supposed to change; with time, experience, environment. It’s a natural progression.
I didn’t change like this though. I forced myself into it. I shaped myself into someone I believe I had to become, & in doing so I am anything but myself. Deliberately sculpted by my own hands & now I can never return to who I used to be.
I used to be such a pushover. I was blunt & honest but tried so hard to remain timid. I would do almost anything anyone asked of me, rarely questioning & NEVER arguing. I was strangely outgoing. I would compliment strangers without hesitation, asked people directly if they wanted to be friends. I was never embarrassed, unapologetically myself. Albeit extremely cringe, but anyone who knew me back then knew me without restraint. Now, I’m the most embarrassed girl in the world.
As time passed, I grew more & more embarrassed. My nature began to be humiliating. People pushed me to be uncomfortable & ashamed. I became blatantly aware of how I appeared. Perceived horribly. I don’t blame others; it would be dishonest to pretend this was only their doing. The change was still my decision. It’s only a factor in why I changed. Social matters, familial matters, maybe even political & cultural matters.
I made myself normal in anyway I could. I stopped speaking to strangers so easily. I stopped complimenting people without thinking. I began to think before I spoke. I didn’t want to look like a tone-dense fool. Now I’m too cruel & too restrained.
No one likes a happy, outgoing; ugly girl. If you are going to be cheerful, open, & freely expressive, you must also be beautiful. Those traits are forgiven in beautiful people. They are charming in someone beautiful. But in someone ordinary or ugly, they are treated as delusion.
But even knowing that, I don’t care anymore. I want to be myself again.
Now I’m afraid of the smallest things. I hesitate to tell new people something as simple as my favorite food. I miss so badly who I was. Blunt & unafraid, constantly cheerful
Now it feels like the people I meet never truly know me. Worse than that, the people I’ve known for years don’t know the real version of me anymore, because I’m the one who hid it. I’ve put myself in a box & I don’t know how to get out of it. It’s made me sick for years.
I’m a faux Yaya & now anyone who knows me or meets me will only know a faux Yaya.
I’ve gotten a boyfriend recently. I know in a *lot* of my excerpts I end up confessing guilt over something. Unfortunately, this is another one of those. I feel guilty about it, not about him directly. More broadly; guilty about the situation.
He’s so objectively handsome & so conventionally attractive. He’s tall, well put together, has perfectly placed features & more. But even if you stripped away all the physical attributes, he would still be remarkable. He’s stereotypically romantic, gives constant compliments, flowers for no particular occasion, planned dates instead of vague suggestions, small gestures. He’s so genuinely kind. He’s Socially competent, warm, outgoing, & thoughtful to people. He’s a hypothetical kind of man. He is so much more than a catch.
I feel guilty because he’s my first boyfriend. I’ve known, easily, more than a hundred girls who have been in relationships. Bad ones & good ones, but always with men who could never be what my boyfriend is. Girls who dated guys who were careless, inattentive, immature; or girls with good guys, guys they’re happy with, who still would not do what my boyfriend does naturally. It feels so wrong that my first experience with a relationship is so fortunate. Like someone trying a hobby for the first time & purchasing the most expensive equipment & immediately finding success. I am so spoiled. I skipped a necessary difficulty that other women had to endure.!?
It feels like a ridiculous stroke of luck.
But sometimes I go back & forth on that idea. It’s not as if I’ve never thought about romance before, or never pined after someone. I probably just expressed less interest in it than the people I knew. It’s also not as if there were never people interested in me either. I’ve had a couple of “suitors,”.
They were just always incompetent. Whether they were handsome or not didn’t matter. They all acted the same. The people who pursued me had no social awareness, no conversational ability, or they were so painfully stupid. Others would jump from relationship to relationship with no pause, no mourning period, & suddenly claim they had feelings for me. Clearly just desperate for *any* relationship, not me specifically. If someone isn’t fit to maintain basic friendships, it’s hard to imagine them sustaining a healthy relationship either. This was 99% of everyone who pursued me.
Sometimes I wonder if my boyfriend wasn’t a ridiculous stroke of luck because of this. Maybe I’m just competent. If 99% of the people who sought me out were like this, this must be true for other women. But many women I know have had far more relationships than I have. Maybe I’m just not a blinded, hopeless romantic who attaches to the first person who shows interest.
This is unfair of me to say though. The girls I know aren’t oblivious. Maybe I am lucky.
I don’t have the best relationship with my mom. It’s really hard to forget all the things she did, but at the same time it feels like I can’t remember anything she did. All my memories are so lost, they all feel fabricated. Like I can’t remember anything correctly. It feels like it’s her fault.
My whole life, & even now, I refuse to call the things she did to me abuse. People around me do. Sometimes they tell me about their own families, things that are much smaller, & they use that same word for them. My whole life I felt like I was attempting to prove myself to her, proving I deserved to be housed, to be kept. When love becomes something you must constantly earn, it stops feeling like love at all. All I ever really wanted was for her to treat me how she treated my brother.
I’ve moved out now. I live with my father. Everything she did seems to echo louder now than it did when I was with her.
When I was little, we all lived in my grandparents’ house. I barely remember her from those years. She was always gone, working I think. I have no memory of her raising me the first seven years of my life. I only remember her hitting me, & being the reason I broke my arm. When we finally moved away, my memories of her became clearer, but not kinder. Sometimes she could be gentle, almost convincingly so, but the pattern never changed. Apartment after apartment, it followed us. Punishments for things I did, punishments for things I didn’t do, beatings that left bruises or wire marks. Once it went on until I couldn’t walk. After my dad moved out there were days she simply didn’t feed me. None of these things happened every day, but they happened often enough that they became the shape of what I remember childhood being.
As I grew older, the things she said to me became clearer than the things she did. Most of my weekends & school days were spent cleaning. Floors, counters, dishes, the same surfaces over & over again. Not just chores, it was a form of punishment. If something wasn’t clean enough, if I missed a corner or left a streak of dust somewhere, she would yell, or she would hit me. Mistakes were treated like proof of something deeper wrong with me.
Sometimes she would call me a slave. My own mother saying it, a black woman even more than I am. She would say it if the house wasn’t clean enough, if I didn’t move fast enough, if I looked tired or upset while doing it. She would say that if I couldn’t even clean her house properly then I wasn’t good enough to be one. I wasn’t allowed to have friends either, & she told me that didn’t matter because no one would ever see me as an equal anyway, being black meant the world had already decided what I was worth. And to her that was essentially nothing. Then sometimes she would sit me down & make me watch history documentaries, telling me I should be grateful for my ancestry, that I should appreciate where I come from. I remember the glow of the television more clearly than the lessons themselves.
When we finally moved into a real house, nothing really changed. This all persisted. By middle school I had started wanting the ordinary things other kids had; to go outside, to have friends, to stay after school for something that wasn’t going straight back home. But none of that was allowed. From 12 to 19, I wasn’t to be outside under any circumstance other than school. No friends, no staying out, no extracurriculars, no job, I couldn’t even get a permit.
By then she was older, so the beatings weren’t always as rough as they used to be, but something about them felt more unpredictable. She started doing weird shit. Sometimes she would threaten me holding a kitchen knife, once she strangled me & repeatedly yelled she was going to kill me, another night she woke me beating me, the worst I’d ever had it, saying she meant to beat me to death because I hadn’t finished the dishes. There were other things, times when she would behave in ways that were deeply uncomfortable, she would masturbate at the most awkward times & force me to hug her or give her any sort of physical contact.
I really wanted her to love me. I really wanted to be a daughter to my mother.
Now I’m not under her rules anymore. On paper I have no excuses now. I can get my license. I can go outside. I can build a life. But I can’t stop thinking of the years that came before this. I still think about the things I missed; friends I lost because I could never hang out, friends who stopped believing me when I tried to explain why. School dances, field trips, ordinary moments everyone else got without thinking. Things that made me the jealous girl I am today.
What frustrates me most is how everything seems to change depending on where I stand. When I lived with her, people told me to leave without remorse. Now that I have, voices tell me to forgive her, to go back, to try again. She acts kinder now too, at least from a distance, especially when other people are around to see it. It makes me feel like my memories are false.
I can’t even fit half the things she did into a single excerpt. Camera’s in the house where I tend to reside, putting on her clothes for her, publicly scratching my skin, making messes so I have to clean, letting my brother hurt me. I feel ashamed to state any of this.
The most beautiful thing I own is my Franklin Mint, House of Faberge, ‘Imperial Rose’ carousel horse.
I have a lot of carousel horses (though none true); I have carousel music boxes, carousel *horse* music boxes, carousel windchimes, a 5ft carousel horse party decoration, carousel horse statues, spinning carousel collectibles. But none compares to my Imperial Rose.
I love carousels, I love horses! My whole life I’ve liked horses, & majority of my life I’ve loved simple, spinning rides. But my real fascination with carousels began in early middle school, when I started researching them obsessively. Their history, the hand-carved horses, the cost of creating one. Somewhere in all that reading, I formed a loud dream of having my own carousel. Not necessarily a great one, a simple one would be nice.
Horses are so pretty. And when pierced with a pole, gilded, frozen mid-gallop, they are all the more beautiful! The carousel is proof that people will build entire worlds just to keep beauty turning.
Again, what do you know; I’m writing about guilt. Except this time I don’t actually feel guilty, I’m just culpable. I walk around acting like I’m this sweet thing, like I’m incapable of lying. I present myself like an open book, open for anyone who cares to read. As if everyone who meets me walks away knowing me completely.
I do tell people things!! Real, personal things. Technically, none of what I do share is lies. I push the boundaries of honesty further than most people probably would. It’s why I seem absolutely open. I’m just deceitful.
There are things I will never tell anybody, things I won’t even write here. I know I am totally manipulative for this. My vagueness will make this come across as an exaggeration, but I don’t want to incriminate myself by being anything but vague..?
I pretend like I’m incapable of lying so that I can get away with lying. Writing this feels sucky. Unpleasant, sharing a thing meant to be unshared by me. But why am I admitting to something I don’t even feel guilty about..? I don’t have a noble answer for that, I think I just wanted to write.
Too Raw
It feels selfish to confess this, especially when people are so generous with their compliments about my body. I hear these compliments often enough that I should believe them; that I am well-shaped, soft in the places meant for softness, curved. By every reasonable measure I am healthy, ordinary, & maybe even fortunate. But I want an eating disorder. I feel a dissonance, a small & persistent discomfort with the weight of my own form. The body I inhabit brushes against itself, chafes, occupies space; I’m always reminded of it. I can’t be carried, I know. Sometimes I imagine a different silhouette, slimmer, quieter. Narrow & delicate, a body fragile. I would be so light. To look sickly & faint is always beautiful to me.
It’s a little irrational. Though I know I would never go through with obtaining one. I’ve been in spaces that promote this behavior for a decent amount of time now. I just lack the resolve that this destruction demands. I enjoy food too much, flavor too much, the simple sensory joy of taste. Anorexia seems absurdly impractical when I imagine the hours wasted, the indignity of it. Bulimia would be the way to go for me; I can regurgitate quite easily. But I’m too idle.
Too idle to diet, too idle to sculpt myself through discipline, too idle even to pursue unhealthy fantasies. I would like to make my body disappear. Maybe this idleness is all the more reason for me to have one.
Not long ago, I suffered from an addiction to consuming gore-”graphy”. In a way that someone might describe their dependence on pornography or adrenaline. I never enjoyed what I saw. It did not excite me or fascinate me in any way. Every viewing made me physically ill; my stomach would churn & burn, my forehead would throb, & my blood would feel like it got warmer. But the feeling itself was very singular, I’ve never encountered that particular nausea anywhere else. Only ever when I was watching someone be hurt.
The disgust is immediate & overwhelming, but I always returned to it again & again. I think the revulsion itself is why I was addicted. The forbidden has a strange gravity; the very things which revolt us most violently can become the objects we circle obsessively, precisely because they fracture our sense of order. I suspect that is what held me there. I gained no pleasure from it, no dopamine, no thrill. Only a sickening “awareness” .
I have since stopped watching those kinds of videos. It has been years since I’ve seen true gore in motion. But I’ve not entirely left it behind. I seek it out in smaller, diluted doses. Images of people post-accident, aftermath of violence that has already passed, or even special effects. Humanity possesses an almost pathological curiosity toward its own decay. I prove this true in some sense.
My ‘curiosity’ is cruel & wrong, but sometimes the images carry an uncomfortable beauty. Death can be beautiful. I still feel guilty for the things I watched, for the deaths & tortures I knowingly sought out & witnessed from a distance. That guilt won’t ever leave me. And what disturbs me most is that sometimes now I can feel the old craving returning. A desire to experience that terrible nausea again.
This excerpt is basically just a song analysis & to make up for my political guilt. I am who I criticize. (The song is Insanity - Oingo Boingo) Approximately 7 verses in. If compared, the influence is apparent
Political culture in the United States has been growing more & more tense. And more & more taboo. Every opinion risks becoming a liability, post-2024 election, hardened cultural policy; Immigration, education, reproductive rights. Every space I find myself in mirrors & magnifies hostility. Surveillance is in doorbell cameras, workplace monitoring, algorithm on social media.
There is more moral-performance now that I’ve seen than previously. Conservatism grows with our red office. People will call out sin & refuse to look inward. Online, I see self-proclaimed defenders of “law” who dehumanize immigrants & reduce entire groups to statistics, to “pattern recognition,”. These people use legality in a ways to justify their lack of morality. They frame suffering as deserved. So there’s no need to talk about it anymore.
Hypocritical when religions, which preach purity, continue to be exposed for decades of CSA. Even now, we have scandals involving powerful figures & child sex trafficking. We are a culture obsessed with condemning hypothetical “crimes” while real violations dissolve into nothing. We sit in our comfort & only story-tell of corruption.
To speak plainly about any of these, risks you social exile. Politics has become something people claim not to care about, unless it affects them directly. But by then, it *will* be too late! People who do care before they are directly affected are essentially rejected socially. The flock will wander from you if your mind wanders from them. But, we still are a fractured collective, we do not organize, we are split by “party,”.
The past few years have accelerated regarding falsehoods. AI-generated images, political lies, headlines made only for reaction. How will we be able to tell what is true documentation when compared to today’s fabrication..? “Reality is no longer distorted, it is replaced.” Our reality is being imitated. Our ability to think critically is being dulled.
Generative AI is trained on vast & most of the time, unconsented data. Faces, voices, & art are all absorbed, replicated, & redistributed. Paired with the normalization of constant recording; cameras at every threshold, archived interactions. To be listened to while not even speaking. This makes us sound like a surveillance nation.
The insistence that “we are all the same” has also grown louder. Especially as inequality is becoming more visible?? It is repeated as reassurance & dismissal. Avoidance to conversations that might “ruin your comfort,”. Evidence proves this extremely wrong. Federal abortion protections have left access dependent on state & income, immigration enforcement has intensified in ways that disproportionately affect specific communities, & educational restrictions reshape our history. But sure, let’s make believe that we are all the same.
Lately, politics is spoken about the way people talk hypotheticals. Like it’s entertaining, a conversation to pass the time. People sit comfortably & debate rights, bodies, borders. As if these are abstract ideas & not of lives being lived right now. “what would you do, what do you think, what’s your stance”. Things debated casually in one room is someone surviving in another. People untouched by it can afford turn it into discourse, they can afford to not care. It is easier to speak lightly about suffering when your life is not shaped by it, easier to moralize when the cost will never be yours.
There is also a subconscious hierarchy that persists in these conversations. Whiteness continues to function as the baseline for most. This is our assumed neutrality. It’s what allows for so much disengagement, for the belief that politics is optional. The system does not impact everyone equally, no matter how often it is claimed otherwise. We pride ourselves on our progression, yet we are stuck in all of these issues. One million years of evolution & we still repeat. We still have our Danny Quayle.
I want to write something meaningful & to be something meaningful. But all I am is a shallow. All I do is reflect my own image. I don’t care for anything larger than myself & I can’t feel anything larger than myself.
All I have ever experienced is here. In my own body & skull, In my own nerves & my own memory. I am confined to my own consciousness, & so is everything else to me; history, suffering, nations, revolutions. They’re all things I can only hold. Things I know & will not *truly* understand.
How could I ever truly grasp something bigger than myself, when nothing has ever overwhelmed me enough to replace me..?
But I *know* that there are things bigger. There are systems that decide who eats, who sleeps, who dies quietly & who dies loudly. There are even people larger than me; philosophers, revolutionaries, artists. People who have changed the world & have legacies larger than anyone else.
I study writers who wrote without comfort, who believed that history itself had a direction. Writers who didn’t just observe the world but really tried to change it.
Compared to my writing. I write to compensate for what I am not. I write as a form of self-correction, & even self-deception. It is *so* humiliating. To construct meaning artificially, to only simulate depth instead of live it. And still, everything I think has already been thought. Everything I want to say has already been said. And it’s been said more eloquently, louder, & more violently than I could ever potray it. My words are anything but unique, & I am still trying to make my words original.
“While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.” Proof that thoughts & ideas will outlive flesh. I’m still writing, “hoping,” my ideas, added to the already acknowledged pile, will do something. Hoping my repetition will act as a form of participation.
If I am honest, my beliefs, if defined, line up with Marxism. Because of recognition. When I look at the structure of things, they are rigged in ways that are so obviously deliberate. Inequality today is very present, & still maintained. It’s only refined. My nation is decaying more apparently than it was before. And all people do is theorize suffering.
I sit here, aware. Aware of systems, of suffering, & of inequality expanding. And I write about it. I just make it into something consumable. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” And look at that, I don’t change anything. “But what am I going to do as an individual..?” A typical statement said throughout histories of injustice. One that I follow along with. Using whatever sorry justification for it, same as the last guy. It’s just permission to remain still & to remain theoretical.
People, myself included, are so comfortable believing we are too small to matter. It has us believe we are absolved. But history was not moved by people who believed this. “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Does my writing count as movement, or am I just as blind & bound..? I do feel chains, though I feel it in the same place where I feel everything else, internally & selfishly. Even my being upset is filtered through myself, even my empathy comes back to me. I am tender in all the places I have already begun to rot & that tenderness is only honest part of me. The awareness of decay without the strength to stop it. I can only articulate collapse & will not interrupt it.
I am almost human, but 100% myself, this is my problem & the only thing that has ever been true. To be human requires dissolving the self just enough to let something larger pass through you. To act & not only observe. One must risk being changed by the things you claim to care about. But I am still here & I’m still intact. And I am still writing. Trying to make my “self-awareness,” something meaningful.
Soon to come, last updated 03-27-26