self-hatred

It's a beautiful night
We're looking for something dumb to do
Is it the look in your eyes
Or is it this dancing juice
Who cares baby
I think I wanna marry you


I've been hearing this song a lot lately.  If someone is going to ask me to marry him, I will most likely care whether it's because of a bottle of cheap booze or not.  I don't want him to say he *thinks* he wants to marry me.  Or that if I wake up and want to break up, that's cool.  But then again, I do like the carefree approach towards life I can see in Bruno Mars' lyrics - something I would call アメリカ式刹那主義 (the American way of living only for the pleasure of the moment).

It reminds me of the guy I slept with a couple of years ago when I hated myself.  Now that I think about it, I think his principle of living only for the moment and not caring about the past or the future seemed attractive because it was the time in my life when I was forced to think about my future and I was tired of it.

I didn't have a job, I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I hated myself.  And when you hate yourself, you get sour and start to criticize all kinds of things.  Things or people that never would've gotten on my nerves annoyed me; I was almost always irritated, and I hated how my dad said I wasn't entitled to criticize anyone who had a job.  "At least they're supporting themselves," he would say.

"So I don't even have freedom of speech because I can't support myself?"  I decided to get a job and worked as a part time translator for a while.  All I wanted was to be free.  Free from my future.  Free from the idea that I had to have a dream.  Free from all the expectations - mostly my own expectations.

Thinking about it now, I did nothing to find a breakthrough but I did almost anything to get away from myself - until one day I slept with a guy I didn't even like.  And even that wasn't enough to wake me up.

"My life wasn't supposed to be this way." - a line I never pictured myself saying almost fell from my mouth.  I just didn't know what I wanted to do.  It was the first time in my life that I couldn't imagine my future.  I didn't know that not being able to picture tomorrow could be so tough.

I don't know how I overcame my self-hatred, or if I have, in fact, overcome it.  But if there had been a breakthrough, I think it naturally came when I became honest to myself.  By the time I realized it, I wanted to be a doctor and nothing else.  I still had some hesitations; I didn't know if I would be feeling the same a year later, but I decided to do what I could for the time being.  And a year later, I was in med school living a life I never imagined.

I still sometimes hate myself, but I think I was very lucky that I had parents who waited for me while I took my time deciding on what I wanted to pursue, and I want to thank them for still supporting me.  I guess I now see that I have no time for self-hatred.