An Asshole’s Guide to Not Hating Yourself
Hi! I’m Louise, and I’m an asshole.
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Hi! I’m Louise, and I’m an asshole.
Trigger warning for discussion of eating disorder behaviours.
It’s Saturday today. It’s the day off I force myself to take; I slept in, did an hour of yoga, sipped on my fancy tea. I call it self-care, even though it’s somehow more stressful to think about taking care of myself than it is to think about work.
(trigger warning for discussions of suicide, hospitalisation)
In March of this year, at about eleven in the evening, I sat down on the edge of my bed. My partner, of six years, who I had met in the smoking area one Halloween when he was dressed as the wrong Doctor from Doctor Who and I just had to pass comment on it, had just voluntarily left our shared home to go to hospital for a psychiatric evaluation after a suicide attempt. From there, he would be committed to a mental ward, where he would stay for the next month (note: would it be funnier if I had titled this article “in the month of madness”?).
Do it anyway.
I’ve been vegetarian for pretty much my entire life. I’ve just never really liked meat, and did the usual baby-vegetarian thing of looking at my cats, looking at my chicken nuggets, and figuring that I didn’t want to put things in my mouth that came from another animal, something which had the figurative ability to snuggle on my lap during Saturday morning cartoons. For a long time – about fifteen years, aside from some brief breaks – I was just vegetarian and I was just fine with it and I politely ate my Quorn chick’n chunks in relative peace.
Alright, y’all gay-ass (and other queer-adjacent terminology-ass) motherfuckers: it’s Pride month, and that means I’ve got to squeeze in some LGBT content amongst my searingly incisive deep-dives into how shit Gotham is. I mean, I already have, just a little, but there’s always room for more.
For me, and for everyone else I know who’s had to do it, coming to terms with and coming out with your non-straight, non-cis-ness is usually a long, drawn-out, painful, exciting, scary, affirming dream-nightmare of a process. So I thought I’d give you a little poke around my own self-serving fascination with storifying my own history to indignantly boring effect everything that led to me coming out! I’ve covered some of my experiences previously here, but this time I just want to get stuck in to all the weird little details that turned me into the unstraight I am today. Let’s get to it!
Honestly, I’m going to get back to the fun stuff soon, I am. It’s just that Riverdale has been off air for three weeks and maybe it’s the only thing giving my life meaning, you know? Well, time for one more introspective bungee-jump before it’s back tomorrow.
Trigger Warning for discussion of anorexia, bulimia, and general eating disorder behaviour.
If this is your first post in my OCDiaries series, detailing life with OCD, please consider checking out the rest of it right here!
I’m seven years old, and I’m standing in front of an unopened packet of new toothbrushes: four, one for each member of my family. And I know I have a big choice in front of me, because the colour of the one I choose will dictate the safety of all of them. Red? No, too close to blood, which is murder, which is death. Green? A shorthand for sickness, which is death. Blue? Water, which could be drowning, which is death. I settle for yellow, even though it could represent the sun swelling to destroy the whole planet, but that seems like the least likely potential death scenario so, reluctantly, I brush my teeth with that one. I know, somewhere inside me, that this is a lot of worry to be applying to a toothbrush, but I’m not risking disaster for some foolish green-toothbrushed hubris.
The Cutprice Guignol 