Dear Katie,

I can’t stop thinking about someone who is not only mean and horrible, but specifically mean and horrible to me. My intellectual understands that my old patterns make his cruelty feel like love but it still doesn’t stop my brain from obsessing! How can I escape this mind prison I made?!!! 

Content Warning: Mentions of substance use and eating disorder.

There’s a rat in my apartment, a manifest metaphor for this year. We’ll get back to him. 

It surprises me how much advice I give in this column that I need to give to myself. There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness, so please take mine. I’ll take yours. 

The inability to break old patterns or escape “mind prison” was my 2024.  In reading your question, I can tell we are equally tired. Like me, a part of you hates yourself. 

Here’s how you get out of this: 

Read about intermittent reinforcement trials on rats. If you give a rat a feeder that sometimes dispenses a lot of food and then, randomly, none at all, the rat will lose its mind. It grows both feral and weak. Now, imagine that feeder is the person you love. Sometimes, I’m sure he’s very nice to you. Sometimes, he’s awful. You see what I’m getting at?

We are not here to be feral rats. 

Let the person go. Feel every pathetic, painful and final feeling about them. Don’t try to bypass any of this. It won’t work. 

I have spent an astounding amount of 2024 in tears. I thought my heart was broken and done. I am an avoidant person, I couldn’t avoid this. Grief is such a delusional motherfucker. You believe what happened could be reversible. You act like it never happened at all. You act like it wasn’t that bad. 

That act is brittle, it’ll break. 

It will be easy to paint the person who is mean to you as the villain. Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that. People who hate themselves are their own villains. 

Until we heal our relationships with ourselves, cruelty, from any source, will feel good. For me, the real heartbreak of this year was realizing that the relationship was just the basic emblem of the bigger issue. 

I had not healed much. My life was a constant game of whack-a-mole — problems I thought I’d solved kept coming back. The deeper I looked at my choices, the more I realized I had fixed nothing, I’d just put lipstick on a pig.

Taking too many sleeping pills, not to, like, die, but to feel nothing? Only being this honest with an audience, not to anyone real? What about not eating? What about becoming so slight you don’t even bleed anymore? Well, okay, start eating again and then promptly stop because clothes being too small is terrifying. Work so hard, write so much, you throw your back out. Say yes to everything anyone asks of you. Let people who’ve really fucked up back into your life. 

Get on your knees so other people can feel tall. 

You shift from villain to hero when you’re so sick of yourself you have no choice but to change.

One day, the crying stopped. I got up off my knees. I realized the key to everything was in what I was avoiding. I had to stop hurting myself. 

I listened to that Gracie Abrams song on repeat. 

Made it out alive, but I think I lost it

Said that I was fine, said it from my coffin

Remember how I died when you started walking?

That’s my life, that’s my life

I’ll put up a fight, taking out my earrings

Be prepared. The goriest fights are shadowboxing. 

Here’s what I tell myself and what I’ll tell you. The central drama of life is essentially fraud, so con yourself into believing you like yourself. Belief shifts reality. Choose to be kind to yourself in small ways when you used to be mean. Try to love even the part of you that wants to hurt you. 

People will tell you a way to do this is to love your inner child. That does nothing for me because I never felt like a child. What moves me? What 80-year-old Katie would say. 

“Stop being such a wild fucking rat.”

Everything I do now is to make her proud. She tells me it’s all going to work out, that I will be delivered to a distant and safe shore. I don’t need to swim so hard. 

If 80-year-old me loves herself, and time is a construct, 36-year-old me can try. 

Last night the rat and I came face to face. Well, sort of. He was in his trap, squealing. I started crying, not because I was scared. I felt pity for him. We were the same — just looking for somewhere warm, hungry and trapped, putting up our own fight. 

That doesn’t mean I didn’t kill him. It didn’t feel as good as I thought it would. Maybe that’s true of killing anything that haunts you.

But what choice do we have?

Catch up on previous editions of All The Mistakes I’ve Made.