Depression - Hate

The numbing B-movie mode of my existence did not achieve everything by its own. “I fucking hate myself. I hate it. I hate life. I hate my life. I hate these assholes. I hate this world.” Now let’s fill this highly-sophisticated sentence with anger, let’s repeat it, sounding like a broken record, spice it up with self-reflective meta-hate for repeating it. Let’s do this several times a day. For some weeks in a row.

I do not remember whether this hate-depression was before, after, or intermixed with the zombie-depression. I do know that in the beginning hate had rarely been the real word for it, but it was soon enough. The start was a cocktail of despair, made from hopelessness due to the perceived impossibility of improvement, anger due to the (arguably real) failures of the world, and more and more anger for my own shortcomings.

Repeat something often enough, and it becomes second nature. After despising myself, telling myself that I hate everything, concentrating all my anger on me not fixing the world, the resulting self-hatred might be called expected.

Like the zombie state, the wish to painful self-destruction did not start turned up to eleven on day one. For me it started from the simple “you should have been able to do this; you didn’t”. Then was added “and therefore you are weak”. Later it continued “and also you are totally worthless”. Then the wheel of ever increasing intensity of negative emotions just spun faster.

Whereas during zombie-depression I usually only wanted to fall asleep, in such hateful phases I was more often than not wishing for violence, against myself as well as against just about everyone in existence.

The result was mostly the same. Drained of energy, motivation, goals, concentration, sleep, filled with either silent or intense anger and hatred, I would remain dysfunctional, a hollow shell playing myself as puppetmaster to keep up the necessary appearances, and avoiding out of fear the dangling question of what was wrong with me. Because I really deserved to suffer, and stop existing, me despicable slug.