At 36, I am happier with myself than I’ve ever been. More than any time in my life, I take joy in simply being me. But this week has been a harsh reminder that I still have a healthy dose of self-hatred running through my veins. I’ve hated myself for much of my life. This may seem like an exaggeration when I can truthfully report being the product of a loving, accepting family. But it’s not. For years, when I looked in the mirror I saw some kind of ugly, repellent monster. (Note: I am aware this statement is free fodder for trolls. But I believe in charity.) The reasons for this are many, varied, mysterious and keep me in therapy for now. My favorite reason I have come up with so far is that in a past life I was one of those freakishly weird deep-sea fish that never sees the light but, a la Chances Are with Cybill Shepherd and Robert Downey Jr.,  my memory of that life was not adequately erased in the pre-reincarnation work-up.  Hence, in human form I maintained a jowly, hulkish, warted self-image and my aversion to the sun.

The real reasons are unfortunately less interesting. I wasn’t a delicate girl. An older boy in school once said my hands looked “beastly.” And I believed him. I hated the way I looked. At a dinner party a couple of months ago, I confessed quite innocently that when I was a little girl I used to play “Beauty Alien” with myself. The game involved me simply imagining an alien came to the planet to give me a makeover. I assumed everyone had some variation on the theme. Apparently not. But as we laughed hysterically amidst sci-fi re-imaginings of “Beauty School Dropout,” I felt a twinge of sadness pass through me at realizing how early in life I believed only cosmic help could save me from my ugliness.

A tall and tomboyish girl, I didn’t quite fit in with the gender norms celebrated by my conservative community.  It didn’t matter that my own parents gave me the permission to dress and play the way I wanted. The system had other ways of keeping girls like me in check. When I was eleven, I cut my hair short resulting in my friend group electing a representative to inform me in the girls’ bathroom that they could no longer be my friends because I looked like a boy. I should have roared back: “It’s a pixie cut, dumbass! And I think your standards for what it means to look like a girl should be qualified by the fact that we are all pre-pubescent eleven year olds.”

Instead, I shrunk further inside.

Unfortunately, this episode happened near the start of sixth grade–my first year at our neighborhood public school. There was nowhere else to go. My parents had made the very difficult decision of moving my brother and me out of our little church school, the two-room building where I spent the first five years of my elementary education. Their decision, jointly decided but stubbornly held to by my father, a generally easy-going man who deferred to our mother for things like shaping the course of our religious upbringing, was born out of concern that we were not being appropriately challenged or nurtured in a multi-grade classroom that used the same science textbooks for both third and fifth grades. And it caused a sizable rift in our small Adventist community which placed primary importance on “Christian education.” A friend’s mother once told me how her own parents had to sell the family’s beloved horse in order to pay for her private Christian schooling. And the way she said it, it was clear that she wouldn’t hesitate to do the same for her own children.

At the news that the Isaacs were putting their children into a public school, church members began to stop my parents–at church, in the grocery store, wherever they ran into them–to helpfully inform them how they were placing our salvation at risk. I remember going to Sabbath School one day and being directly confronted by the adult leader in front of my peers about the strong likelihood that I was now going to get pregnant and start using drugs. I have a vague memory of telling him to “shut up” and walking out. Of course, word of this got back to my parents. But when my mother, a woman who is normally the paragon of kindness and diplomacy, heard me explain the context for my remarks she let it go. This being just one in a series of churchy grossness housed in the same sanctuary where my parents spoke their wedding vows to each other some fifteen years prior, they soon changed our membership to another Adventist church.

But by then, I already hated myself. In fact, I had made a pretty public display of it in our church school. And my parents knew I was not going to be able to socially recover from it anytime soon. Especially if they left me in the same little fishbowl where I first crashed and burned. A model student on the surface, I was a little ball of confusion and misery on the inside. At the age of ten, I began to express this by writing hate notes to myself at school. Elaborately conceived, I wrote the notes in my right, non-dominant hand so that the handwriting would not look like mine. The hate notes sometimes included death threats. And always I would carefully hide them where they could be later be “found.”

Of course, this created a delicious drama in the classroom as our teacher began her detective work of discovering the note-writing culprit. This seemed to just up the ante for me as I found other ways of dropping notes. Once, I even thought of framing a boy in my class who had been my mortal enemy all year. We hated each other equally but he was physically stronger. At least twice, we fought each other in the bandroom. Each time, he won by sitting on my head. Once, he spit in my face.

It didn’t take long for me to mess up though. Maybe a week or two. I was only ten, after all. Masterminds take time to develop their craft. (I do take certain pride in a level of originality in expressing my psychological distress. My therapist told me that in all her years of working with children that she never heard of a child writing hate notes to themselves. She said it was an incredibly “creative” way of asking for help. Absolutely genius.)

Unfortunately, my call for help wasn’t heard. I was instead outed like a criminal the day my best friend happened to witness me in the act of dropping one of the notes. When it was brought to the teacher’s attention, she dutifully and honorably told the truth. God, I was so angry with her for that.

However, the fact that my friend snitched on me (I might be a little angry about that still) it wasn’t evidence enough of my guilt for my teacher. She demanded I confess publicly. And she refused to let any of the class go at the end of the day until I did so. The clock ticked ominously, all eyes on me, silently blaming me for being kept after class and judging me for being a lying weirdo creep. You would think that if a child is writing hate notes to herself that a public shaming might be contra-indicated. But this was old school schooling. I should probably be grateful that I didn’t get the paddle.

Of course, my teacher told my parents about the hate notes which caused great concern and a consultation with a child psychologist. However, she left out the part about burning me at the stake in front of my peers. And being of an age where I still believed my parents to be omniscient, I thought they knew all the terrible details which caused me to interpret their silence on the matter to mean they were in general agreement. It was only a couple of years ago when I learned they had no idea what really happened that day. On the phone with my mom when the oversight was identified the rage in her voice was a retroactive balm to my soul.

If our lives have spotlight moments that impact the course of everything that follows, then this was one of those moments for me. But when I try to look for the roots of all this self-hatred, it feels like I fall into a rabbit hole of possibilities. I’m not sure I will ever find ground zero in the broken places of my psyche. I’m not sure it’s even important or critical.  Given the prevalence of depression, addiction, eating disorders, bullying in our society and the enormously lucrative self-help industry to counter each, it seems that most people hate themselves at least a little bit. Apparently, the fact that I do hate myself at all makes me quite normal.

Even people who really shouldn’t have a reason to hate themselves do. Celebrities are generally considered the most beautiful and successful among all living beings. And yet, how many of them are still searching for the elusive Brigadoon of beauty by cutting on their bodies and injecting butt fat and/or dead deadly bacteria into their faces? And all too often in the process of grasping at apparitions of perfection a line is crossed into cartoonish tragedy that we serfs like to gawk over in the check-out line in an ever expanding Hall of Schadenfreude. Because trout pouts are hil-air-ee-us.

Likewise, flipping through the pages of any celebrity magazine, you will encounter the increasingly popular photo spread of famous celebrity women without their make-up. These kinds of stories are maddening because they are billed as sensational when all they’re really proving is how normal everybody is, even the most beautiful among us. It’s like we’ve all forgotten what women really look like without six layers of makeup and the heavy application of Photoshop.  Being catty and mean about the fact that not even Mila Kunis looks like Mila Kunis without some help is like getting mad at jackrabbits for not being jackalopes. Yet, somehow a troubling number of women (and men) have bought into the jackalope myth. Oh, you weren’t born a natural jackalope? Well, we have expensive, surgical ways of attaching antlers to your head.

But even though I can see the insanity in all of it, I still haven’t completely pulled out the roots of self-hated in my own mind. Spending most of my life believing I was weird monster-girl obviously makes those roots run deep. And I still experience the drawbacks of living with that kind of residual poison. Despite the enormous strides I have made at accepting myself as a real human woman without gorilla hands and fish gills, I can still be devastatingly hard on myself. This past week, I revisited the old Ugly story in embarrassingly undignified ways. I thought taking up stand-up comedy as a hobby was the Universe’s way of helping me to confront my crippling fear of rejection. Turns out, that was just a warm-up for dating. Dating makes me crazy. I am just getting better at hiding that fact and increasing my capacity for sitting with the adolescent madness that is my brain when I meet a man I like without doing anything too stupid. That might be the best I can hope for on the road towards healing. Still, being alone in my own head as it shouts hateful things into my ears is like trying to sit still in a Fear Factor tank of cockroaches.

But then I remembered my genius hate notes. My brilliantly creative call for help. No one could hear me at the time I sent my SOS. But I sent it all the same. In the end, I sent those notes to myself. I sent them across the time-space continuum to drop into my lap precisely when I need them. This week, they helped me remember the larger journey of healing that I have been on from the time I was a scary deep-water fish in another lifetime. And they called for me to keep going, to listen to my own call for help.

The world of Seventh-day Adventism can be comically small. A few years ago, I ran into my fourth-grade teacher again.Over twenty years had passed since that day when my hate notes and I were found out under her punitive watch. But at the mention of her name, I was right back in her classroom on that day. Just the prospect of seeing her again sent me reeling with shame. Here I was–a grown woman with loving friends and family and a respectable job as a hospice chaplain, of all things–about to face the woman whom I believed could see through all the Ms. Goody-Two-Shoes packaging of my life to the core of who I really was: a ugly, lying, evil little girl. In terror, I wondered if she would mention that day. Or whether she would look at me with sad condescension. Or smile politely until I left the room and then tell everyone gathered in the room about that day.

But when we saw each other, all she did was hug me. Her frame was tiny. Always a petite woman, she seemed frail now, too, in her mid-seventies. She never mentioned that day. I didn’t ask. She looked at me. And truly, I saw nothing but warmth and kindness. And somehow nothing needed to be said.

Perhaps this is will be an unsatisfactory end for some. No day of reckoning. No verbal evisceration. No out-loud moment of reconciliation. Shouldn’t she have been made to understand how she treated me–how she likely disciplined most of her students throughout her career–was wrong?  Maybe. But that’s not what I said. It was only later that I realized it was entirely possible she was as nervous to see me as I was to see her. Being so engrossed in my own shame story, I had forgotten she had her own. (Who doesn’t?) A couple of years after the hate-note incident, after my parents had taken my brother and me out of the little church school into the world of public education, we discovered that she was in the midst of her own very painful, very public fall from grace that ultimately contributed to the end of more than one marriage and her position in the school. I know nothing of what she experienced through that but having authored genuine hate notes myself, I think I am better able to  find and read the hate notes that others leave behind more easily. Not always, of course. I have proven myself very capable of being a punitive teacher or judgmental on-looker. People who experienced my Fundamentalist wrath will know of what I speak. But over time, more often than not, my hate notes have made me more compassionate towards the shame and hatred lurking beneath so many of our lives. And now I can’t be sure that what I was seeing in that classroom that day wasn’t in fact a woman trapped in a life that was becoming, in its own way, her own hate note. Seeing her again after all those years, the two of us embracing as women, standing in the vulnerability of the moment, somehow helped me forgive her and forgive myself as easily as dropping a piece of crumpled paper from my hand.