Quotes from Anneli Rufus

Troubles always ensue when assumptions clash, when expectations do not match.

Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated.

Is that what they think, then? That loners have no friends?

APART. Such a simple concept. So concrete. So easy to represent on charts or diagrams with dots and pushpins either in or out. Yet real life is not dots. Some of us appear to be in, but we are out. And that is where we want to be. Not just want but need, the way tuna need the sea. Simple: an orientation, not just a choice. A fact. To paraphrase that Boston song, more than a feeling. We are loners. Which means we are at our best, as Orsino says in Twelfth Night, when least in company.

NONLONERS BORROW A term from Jung and call us introverts. They think it makes them sound intelligent to say so.

To this day, I have a very unhealthy relationship with food. I have an eating disorder; not in that I am anorexic or bulimic—I'm not—but in the sense that I feel extremely guilty every time I eat anything that isn't water. Of course I have body issues.

Your participation is now optional.

Generalization is impossible. It is an insult.

What did they call you that you weren't? What did they never say about you that you were?

Pain is pain, however it begins. And however you got here, one thing is for sure: your self-loathing is not your fault.

We believe that whatever feels at first like joy is not. Or is, but will not last. Or should not last. We feel so sure of this that we will undermine our own inklings of joy, blunting the pain we think awaits. This way we beat pain to the punch. We will not simply sit/stand/lie like suckers when the practical joke finishes, the push, the pendulum. We will not let ourselves be caught off-guard by joy and its evil conjoined twin, irony.

We who hate ourselves believe we are always wrong. We believe that our every thought, word, want, and deed is incorrect, insulting, barbarous. We so believe this that we beg forgiveness not just after every thought, word, want, and deed but during and before. We do this because we want everyone to know we know how wrong we are, how bumbling and ignorant and rude. We do this because we want them to know we know they know.

Fond as [Naomi James] was of her faraway fiancé, another solo sailor, 'I'm a natural loner because as long as I know [my fiancé] is alive and well, I don't really worry about him. He has his life to live and I've got mine, and if I can survive then I'm sure he can.

Sometimes I don't feel as if I'm a person at all. I'm just a collection of other people's ideas," David Bowie told an interviewer in 1972, the same year he scored pop superstardom with his iconic Ziggy Stardust persona. Twenty years later, Bowie confessed that while filling auditoriums with impassioned fans back then, "I had enormous self-image problems and very low self-esteem

What? You don't want any boiled beef tongue? Ha-ha. Eat the fucking tongue. We are the parents, they said, and you are the child.

Do not call attention to yourself with silly gestures. Do not believe that the joy of everyone in your proximity depends on you. Do not fear that one of them might be bored, in pain, or yearning for a list of famous local architects that you must volubly supply. Do not disgorge personal data to invoke an aura of mutual trust. Do not ask anyone their dearest wish or what they would like their last meal to be. Do not try too hard. Do not riff.

Negative thoughts "get stuck in your head and refuse to go, and the more you believe in them the more deeply lodged they become," says Tolle, who describes people with low self-esteem as being "stuck with hostile, life-denying, continuously critical and attacking entities that they carry in their heads and they believe . . . and they are constantly attacking themselves, or if they are not attacking themselves, they attack others around them.

The more I ponder a bright post–self-loathing future, the less possible—the less allowable—it seems. Thus since I surely have no future—because I deserve no future—I have just the past. Which I wasted hating myself. Which I regret. The brighter a putative post–self-loathing future seems, the worse my past appears, thus more regrettable. Self-loathing taught me this.

Because of where we've been, we might not ever totally grow up. Is that so bad? Other adults spend fortunes trying to revive their inner children, trying to be wide-eyed, curious, creative, playful, even vulnerable again. We are already that way. We have always been that way, and we can stay that way. Bring hard-won wisdom, courage, and awareness into it, but candor, laughter, tender sympathy for crying kings and birds with broken wings: these we can keep.

1. What makes you hate yourself? 2. Where do those things occur least? 3. What makes you feel inspired, serene, amused, excited (in a good way), unself-conscious, passionate, compassionate, and more or less at home? 4. Where are those things?

What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. . . . Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is 'borrowed' from the Now.

shapes we had to take in order to please others: the shapes that we hate. Our true selves are the selves we would have been had no one tried to break or shame or change us. Our true selves are what those who actually love us see in us. Our true selves are who we have always been, even if they have been in hiding all this time. Our true selves are who we will, in that sheer blue zone above self-loathing, always be.

the Self-Loathing League.

He was always sorry. He always told you how sorry he was.