The Day I Lost My Bible

A Story of Self-Loathing, Acceptance & Justin Timberlake

They know me too well here. I’ve got to get out. 

That’s the distinct sentiment I recall feeling when I decided I wanted to switch schools in the fifth grade. 

I don’t have many memories from my elementary school years, but the ones I do have are crystalized in perfect clarity. I remember when I got pantsed on the playground, when a boy in class pushed me in the pond and I had to wear a teacher’s clothes for the rest of the day, when I stole jellybeans from the classroom supply and got yelled at, when I made my cousins come into the woods to find fairy houses with me and told them the river water was safe to drink and then they both drank it and both proceeded to vomit all night—

me in the river i deemed safe

—when I stepped in dog poop outside school and tracked it into my third grade classroom and everyone was wondering where the smell was coming from and I knew it was from me but I hoped they wouldn’t notice but of course they did. It was all so embarrassing, and seemed to affirm that I was weird. And bad. And my classmates knew this too well so I simply HAD to go, to start over, start fresh, with a NORMAL personality. At public school! Everything was going to be WONDERFUL at public school!

Then the OCD started.

By seventh grade, I would have done anything to exchange my obsessive compulsions for a run of the mill playground pants-ing, and I wasn’t so worried about my peers smelling shit on my shoes as I was that they would get close enough to hear the dirty, disgusting thoughts that bounced around my head all day or if they knew the only way I could stop the thoughts was to read THE BIBLE (cringe). My friends were like “I can’t believe Tom Riddle is Voldemort” and I was like “anyone else catch the dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine in Gibeah?”

My parents made an effort not to raise us in any particular religion and in fact both have a healthy skepticism when it comes to all organized religious practices. So you can imagine my mother’s shock when 11-year-old me came downstairs in a full blown panic because I “couldn’t find my Bible.” My mom didn’t even know I had a Bible, let alone that I needed it to survive. 

still have the Bible but promise I don’t use it anymore

I had silently developed OCD that manifested in disturbing, intrusive thoughts. Anything dark, sinister, depressing or upsetting that entered my consciousness, whether it was from a lesson in school or a TV news segment I wasn’t supposed to see, would get stuck in my brain and morph into various thought loops that almost always ended in me believing others would die if I didn’t perform a ritual. 

OCD stands for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. My intrusive thoughts of disturbing things were the obsession. The compulsion I thought would relieve the obsession and ensure my thoughts wouldn’t become reality, involved reading certain psalms in the Bible a certain number of times. The Bible was my means of control. I needed it. And everything fell apart when I lost it because someone else was now involved.

The day I lost my bible, my mom entered the OCD chat, and I could no longer suffer in silence. I moved on from the Bible compulsion and developed a ritual of confessing all my intrusive thoughts to my mom by writing them down on crumpled up pieces of paper and passing them to her. She’d drive me to the school bus stop, and I’d pass her a note on my way out of the car, waving and running off in my sparkly Limited Too cargo pants, leaving her alone to process my ominous etchings - “I had a thought the babysitter is going to die.” or “I had a thought that slavery was my fault” or “I had a thought that I spilled soda in the hallway at school and that my teacher is going to step in it and slip and fall and die and it will be my fault and then I had a thought that if my teacher died I wouldn’t be sad” etc. 

Being a parent must be so hard. One day you’re like “phew both my kids are old enough to be in school, I finally have my days back to myself” and the next your preteen daughter is silently passing you notes about killing people and causing slavery.

Hopefully you can imagine how convinced I was, by this point, that I was WEIRD. and BAD. and BROKEN. and DEEPLY disturbed!!!!!! (and responsible for slavery!!!!!!) (which of course, in terms of generational trauma, I am, in some way…. but that’s a discussion for another time)

My mom brought me to a child psychologist who assured me that I was NOT disturbed, I was JUST disordered, I simply suffered from OCD and these thoughts were a textbook symptom, not a reflection of my personality. I went on meds that thwarted the obsessions and compulsions, but it didn’t matter!

By the time I got to high school my belief in my own loathsomeness was so deeply rooted, self-loathing felt as natural as breathing. I put all my energy into avoiding attention. I didn’t speak to anyone outside of a few close friends. When the time came to speak in groups, I would overanalyze everything that verged on coming out of my mouth, terrified my words could expose the real, weird, bad, broken me. It was easier just to be quiet, to shrink away, to go home after school and be alone where no one could hate me but me.

Does that sound extreme? It’s not! It actually makes perfect sense. It’s been my experience that any outward expression of self-loathing tends to be met with disbelief like, “don’t say that about yourself! What? Are you okay?!” And I react the same way when I hear anyone I love talk about not loving themselves as much as I love them. It’s hard to hear! And it’s uncomfortable. I don’t know what the better alternative response would be because I can’t imagine saying “that makes total sense” in response to someone saying they hate themselves. But according to psychological studies of SCIENCE (which I have read but don’t feel like finding right now but message me if you want to read them too) — self-loathing develops in children because it DOES make total sense - it makes more sense that reality.

“I’m weird. I’m broken. I’m wrong.” is a simpler concept, for most of us, in all phases of life, but especially for children to understand because it seems to keep things within our own control. “I’m weird and broken and wrong, BUT I can fix myself! Or better yet, I can hide my true self. I can control it!!!!” — that’s a very appealing phrase for anyone who dealt with out of control circumstances as a kid!

“I’m the problem and I can control it” doesn’t feel like a crisis in the same way that “those responsible for my survival might be unreliable and I can’t control my circumstances” does.  If the environments or adults around us are flawed, that’s a much bigger, much more existential problem that requires acceptance, and often grief. Self-loathing is the opposite of acceptance, at least in my experience. It feels like a constant fight, either to change or to hide.

As an adult these feelings of self-loathing became more subtle and more confusing to me. My life felt pretty normal and relatively successful. But now that I’ve been able to do some more intensive therapy I can look back on myself (with love and acceptance, if you can believe it!) and see how pervasive my self-hatred was. It was like a thin, translucent string around my neck slowly getting tighter and tighter until it would suddenly cut off my circulation and I would totally melt down, lose my grip, but then I would grasp onto some form of external validation or distraction to loosen it again, just enough that I could get by. New boyfriend, string loosened. Millionth bad breakup, string tightened. Back and forth. For years.

Thank God for the boyfriends though - I only really decided to go to therapy because I wanted to someday have a functional, healthy romantic relationship and not to be cheesy but what I got was MUCH better than that (brace for hardcore cringe) — SELF-COMPASSION and SELF-LOVE. OK?!?!?

Related (I promise) - I just saw Justin Timberlake in concert (for a friend’s birthday) (not by choice) (it was actually pretty great though) and one of my friends severely downplayed her Timberlake fandom before the concert, but as soon as Justin said goodbye and left the stage, this friend started chanting “MIRRORS! MIRRORS! MIRRORS! MIRRORS!” Which is the title of a song that Justin promptly returned to perform as an encore.

Since no one can really talk during concerts, I find them to be a meditative experience, in that I usually end up just thinking about myself the whole time. When Justin belted out “'Cause it's like you're my mirror!!!! My mirror's staring back at me, staring back at me!!!!!!” I thought — THE MIRROR IS HUMAN CONNECTION!!!! Like, Jessica Biel is Justin Timberlake’s Mirror, because he let her get to know him intimately, which forced him to have to deal with his demons and deepest grooves of self-loathing! All those years I hid myself, whether I was stashing my bible under the bed or refusing to socialize or speak in high school or getting drunk enough to develop a different personality in college or putting all my self-worth into a job — I was trying to keep people away, because I wasn’t ready to see myself which is what really seeing someone else requires!!!!

…. and now I’m wondering if I should just turn this whole blog post into a thread on the Justin Timberlake subreddit.