On Self-Loathing: My Particular Involvement

The trouble begins, as so much trouble does, in puberty.

One day in the bathroom mirror I discover my nose has been replaced: where it once was particular, elfin, it is now a red blob—like a tomato thrown and then stuck, not quite incorporated. Soon acne spreads, havoc across my cheeks and down my chin, along my jaw, my neck. It creeps below my shirt. There are dermatological interventions and sympathetic nurses, but what the foul-smelling creams make clear in their failure is that the nose has overtaken me. By twelve, my whole face has gone the way of blob.

Three years later, the curse relaxes its hold a little: my braces come off; I take up dancing, whittling my body into a shape I can imagine men might desire; antibiotics mitigate the acne. Even my nose, when the rest of my face catches up with it, isn’t quite so loud. But never am I able to exorcise the spirit of the blob entirely. Indeed, it continues to spread, more stealthily, beyond my physical form. I can be reduced to tears by the inelegance of a belt tail limply hanging, or a French tuck that will not cooperate with my vision. And sometimes, still, I cry over my nose—its all-too-visible pores—or a blemish materialized overnight. Now well into adulthood, I’ve had more crying fits before a mirror than I care to count.

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Self-loathing, whenever it is experienced, is an adolescent emotion, inclining its subject to histrionics. I know of no poem that better captures that fever-pitch than Diane Wakoski’s “I Have Had to Learn to Live with My Face,” which, despite the misleading present perfect tense of its title, rehearses a bitter and ongoing struggle. After all, a person truly reconciled to the fact of her face would not wish for her addressee to “bruise and batter” it, “napalm it, throw acid in it/so that I might have another/or be rid of it at last.” While in my soundest mind I might question the evocation of domestic abuse and the horrors of the Vietnam War in those lines, they get self-loathing right: an altered state in which it is easy to lose one’s sense of proportion.

It’s fitting that the poem is less about being ugly than it is about feeling ugly—though that word never appears. The titular face is, we are told, “plain,” “peculiar,” and, according to friends, “full of character.” While a list of its deficiencies does eventually arrive, one gets the sense that her hatred for her face hinges on an almost classical conflation of outer beauty and inner goodness: if she were beautiful, she would be worthy of love, and vice versa. Qualifying for mere desire is neither solution nor problem—Wakoski’s 1971 collection The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems, which “Face” opens, gives the strong impression of a poet who fucks.

Though the book is famously “dedicated to all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks,” Wakoski takes great pains in the book’s first poem to make clear that “the great betrayer is that one I carry around each day.” The poem’s placement at the outset is, perhaps, a defensive posture. Recall Hannah Horvath, the protagonist of Girls and a self-loather extraordinaire, telling her best friend Marnie mid-fight: “No one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, OK? So any mean thing someone’s gonna think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably in the last half hour!”

The self-obsessed Hannah reveals self-loathing to be an inverted form of narcissism, but one from within which it is possible (however unreasonably, in Hannah’s case) to stake out a position of moral superiority. This is a strong current in Wakoski’s poem, too, despite the noted blurriness between beauty and other more abstract advantages. As much as she may envy “the rich/the beautiful/the talented/the go-getters/of the world,” she also judges them for never having been tested. To maintain dignity in suffering is, in her view, ennobling: “pride and anger and silence will hold us above beauty,” she writes.

That virtue might emerge through self-loathing—and the endurance of whatever has given rise to it—is another old idea. Michel de Montaigne notes that Socrates’s wisdom was derived, in part, from his superlative self-knowledge and corresponding contempt for himself. Jane Eyre, another woman hyperaware of her face’s inadequacies, tells Mr. Rochester as she rejects his proposal to be his mistress: “The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” Janis Joplin to Leonard Cohen: “We are ugly but we have the music.”

If Wakoski’s poem has an ethic, it’s this:

Learning to live with what you’re born with
is the process,
the involvement,
the making of a life.

And what sort of self worth having can be forged from pure ease?

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Puberty may be a crisis for many, but for the transsexual that crisis is not contained to adolescence. When, long after puberty had done its work, I was finally able to re-admit my original understanding of myself to myself, I saw my self-loathing in a new light. “Dysphoria” is not an inapt name for what long confronted me in the mirror: the feeling that something is wrong with you, multiply and terribly, for every wrong thing you see is but an iteration of a more profound, essential wrong, which, in spite of all your efforts to disprove it, you know to be you. Transitioning is not a cure for self-loathing, though after four years on estrogen, I’ve never hated my face less than I do now (nor did I ever hate it more than immediately before starting).

But in altering my sex, have I refused to learn to live with what I was born with, and ignored what I believe to be the wisdom of Wakoski’s poem? That is, I understand, the “gender-critical” line: that I have given up on the integration of the self in favor of indulging my pathology.

Unsurprisingly, I favor another angle: that transition is the process by which I have learned, am learning, to live with what I was born with—my particular involvement. The last question I had to answer for myself before I could decide to do it was whether or not, if I could never be a beautiful woman, I still wanted to become one. I did. And now, as in a fairytale where that willingness was the prerequisite and price, moments come when I do feel beautiful. And plenty when I don’t. That’s life.

By the time this essay is published, a surgeon will have graced me with a new face. I expect I’ll have to learn to live with that one, too.