If this title led you to believe this is a satirical article and in reality, I’m only promoting self-love, I’m sorry to disappoint you. Self-love is indeed an essential thing, but self-loathing can actually be a really beneficial thing. I’m not saying you should go around constantly hating yourself, but self-loathing puts you in a big position of power to potentially propel your life or growth as person forward.

So I’m sure at some point all of us hated ourselves to some degree for something whether it be sounding or being mean in a conversation without intentionally trying to do so, loving you (if you’re a Joan Jett and the Blackhearts fan), or even to the degree where we find ourselves lying awake at night bawling our eyes out until we finally cry ourselves to sleep. While this inevitably feels like shit when it happens, the point is that you can be at the beginning of the end or the beginning of the beginning. While this may sound really vague and weird, the way I see it is that when you’re at the point of hating yourself you have two choices. You can either do nothing and come to hate yourself again at some point in the future, or you can learn from whatever it is left you hating yourself and do something about it. Now, this approach may be tricky to some extent because it may be hard to actually apply this in some situations, but even taking a tiny amount of initiative is better than taking no initiative.

Another thing to think about applying this is “What if I fuck up?” So the funny thing about humans is we make mistakes, a lot. While you may find yourself hating who you are because you spent all this time trying to do better or feel better in whatever aspect you were trying not to hate yourself over, only to have it ruined by one random mistake. While the frustration when this happens is very real, the only thing you can do is make the decision to do something about it again and keep going. You can either let misery define you or you can let it springboard you to something way better.

There are some challenges when it comes to this. Sometimes the spring boarding process takes a lot of time and effort or you don’t know where to even begin. You can’t get discouraged, though. As long as you keep trying, things will work out in some way or another. I don’t know if I have any really concrete advice beyond that because I struggle with this too every now and then. It’s kind of like a lot of things in life that require just jumping into it even though you have no idea what you’re doing and you still don’t after it’s over but somehow you made it through. Just remember, self-hatred can be just as important as self-love.