Unworthy Quotes

“Some of us have spent our whole lives committing suicide. And some of us survived.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“Our true selves are the selves we were before we twisted, bent, and beat ourselves into the 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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“Some in the outside world might call our traumas trivial. Were you gang-raped? Sold into slavery? Imprisoned in a concentration camp? Did you accidentally tweet a naked picture of yourself to twenty million strangers? No? Then stop whining! They would not understand that it is possible to be annihilated by a smirk, a scowl, an empty threat.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“Often the circumstances in which we lost our self-esteem were relationships distinguished by a steeply unequal power balance.
Our spellcasters were parents. Teachers. Bullies. So-called friends. Strangers. Romantic partners. Cliques. Coworkers. Your spellcaster was the mean first grader. Or the psycho in the dark. Or the town, school, Scout troop, spiritual community, family, neighborhood that did not understand your type, whatever that type was. Your spellcaster could even be society at large, that nameless, faceless "them" with boundless power and a thousand biases.
And it became unbearable to be the bullied one, the hounded one, the outcast and excluded one. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, the old saying goes. Others hated us, or appeared to. We joined 'em.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“And yet what has been learned can be unlearned.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“Our never-ending dread has little bearing on the outside world. That is, unless and until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enter enough relationships already certain you will make them fail and you will make some fail. Predict you will drive everyone away and some will be driven away. Inertia. Reticence. Shuffling with heads hung low, avoiding eye contact, always apologizing, seeking reassurance but no amount is ever enough. To others, these habits of ours are exhausting and boring. Life with us is lots of work, Loving those who hate themselves is like swimming upstream: often more trouble than it is worth.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“As businessman Hank Rearden philosophizes in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged: “People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked. . . . The man who lies to the world is the world’s slave from then on.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“Pain is pain, however it begins. And however you got here, one thing is for sure: your self-loathing is not your fault.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“What did they call you that you weren’t? What did they never say about you that you were?”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“Getting low self-esteem is not a choice. We did not choose whatever trauma took us here. Continuing to hate ourselves? This is the tricky part. This is a choice that does not feel like one.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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?”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“He was always sorry. He always told you how sorry he was.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“the Self-Loathing League.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“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,”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“Our true selves, the selves from our “times before,” are waiting for us. Where to find them? In the places and activities that make us hate ourselves the least. Do you hate yourself less than usual while mountain-climbing, singing, studying, discussing lab results, visiting France? Wherever you hate yourself less is where your true self lives, where he or she feels safe to work and play.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“We cannot accept what would normally be joy because we believe we do not deserve it. Thus whatever looks like joy in our lives cannot really be joy but rather something wicked resembling it.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“We cannot accept what would normally be joy because we believe we do not deserve it. Thus whatever looks like joy in our lives cannot really be joy but rather something wicked resembling”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“Was it prejudice that played this trick on you? Or was it expectations of accomplishment, obedience, inclusion, loyalty, or conformity? Subtle, unspoken cruelty or outright abuse? Was it a million tiny things you never even noticed happening, nothing direct or obvious but gestures, glances, images on billboards, yearnings disallowed that left you comparing yourself to everyone and, in your own eyes, falling short? Or was it love? Well-meant guidance gone wrong? Catastrophe? Words overheard? Who put those weapons in your hands, and where are those perpetrators now? What are they doing as we speak? Are they thinking of you? Can they even recall your name or face?”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“Just as soon as children develop awareness, it is essential to demonstrate to them by word and deed that they must submit,” advised Swiss philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer in his 1748 Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children, a text not atypical of its type and time. “It is impossible to reason with young children,” Sulzer asserted. “Thus, willfulness must be driven out in a methodical manner. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own. . . . One of the advantages of these early years is that force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself

“We can change our brains, but it takes time and diligence, because the human brain has a built-in “negativity bias” whereby it stores and learns from negative experiences far more readily and lastingly than it stores and learns from positive ones. This is a natural survival strategy by which the body records danger signs for future reference. It is far more useful for an evolving creature to remember Hungry lions bite than to remember Flowers are pretty. Thus we are neurologically wired to remember more vividly and lastingly a bad experience—say, a public scolding—than to remember a good experience—say, hitting a home run—that occurred on the same day, even if both experiences carried exactly the same emotional intensity for us at the time.”
― Anneli Rufus, Unworthy: How to Stop Hating Yourself