THE ME DEVIL

Hating ourselves at 4,000 words a minute (and how to stop it)

This is You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Recordings are made available for those who can’t make it on the night. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.

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…never stand up for yourself… pathetic… going to look like shit again… didn’t have the bollocks to… prick… idiot…

I remember the button at the pedestrian crossing and I remember the brown-brick wall of the multi-story car park that part of the Royal Victoria Place shopping mall and I remember the feeling of insight rushing into me with such force that it stopped me still on the pavement.

Why are you talking to yourself like that?

I was 19, maybe 20, smoking my breakfast – a thin roll-up cigarette of Drum tobacco pinched between nicotine-stained fingers – en route to the Longplayer record shop in my hometown of Tunbridge Wells. I was working there whilst all my friends from school, who’d managed to pass their A Levels, were in universities scattered up and down the country, revving up for bright futures. I felt bullied at Longplayer, by the other two guys who worked there. I was stealing from the till, and spending the money on amphetamines at the weekend. And, that morning, I was angry at myself all over again.

In my spare time, I put together a music fanzine, and paid some guy in an office £50 cash to run it through his employer’s photocopier on the sly. But he always did it with the pages in the wrong order or upside down. Rather than ask him to do it again, I’d take the pages off him, say thank you, and just put the fanzine together like that. It was embarrassing. 2000 copies of the mag, with upside pages in the wrong order. And I’d thank him! Cheers, that’s great, thanks mate. Why was I like that? Why was I so pathetic? Fucksake. Fucking idiot.

And so I had been shouting at myself again. I’d been shouting at myself in the minutes after I’d woken up, and as I’d showered and dressed and cleaned my teeth and rolled my cigarette whilst walking up Stanley Road, past the vast, glowering red brick church of St Barnabas and the scruffy fish and chip shop, and all the way along Camden Road, and it had been utterly relentless, and utterly ordinary, the abuse not stopping for breath. And then, for some reason, for the first time, I noticed it.

You would never speak anyone else like this. If you spoke to anyone else like this, they’d hit you.

And then I pressed the button at the pedestrian crossing and vanished beyond the reach of this memory that I’m reliving at my desk three decades later.

The wars we fight with ourselves! The brutality! “I am my own worst critic,” we say, with a side-smile of pride, as if boasting: “Ah but you can’t hurt me. I am my own Undisputed Champion of pain.” If we spoke to our partners as we do to ourselves we’d be arrested. But in the privacy of our minds, we cross the line all the time. We are our own everyday abusers. Unforgiving of our mistakes, we push our faces into our errors and hold them there, as a cruel dog owner pushes a wet nose into carpet shit. We smile through days at work, weekends with children and evenings with friends, outwardly normal and succeeding, but inwardly bruised and bleeding, lifelong victims of ourselves.

Why? Why do we do this?