self hatred my love
a birthday is coming home
there’s something so comforting about how much anthony bourdain hated himself. today is my birthday. i turned 41. i’m thinking about this as i sit alone in a hotel room. i’m in bangkok and it’s 90 degrees but i turned the air conditioner off. i hate air conditioning. i am eating instant uncooked instant ramyun noodles out of the bag even though i know 10 steps outside of my hotel there are many restaurants serving some of the best thai food anyone could possibly eat.
if you think being alone in a hotel room on my birthday is sad, wait until you find out i chose this.
the thing i find so comforting about bourdain is how he maintained his self-hatred in the face of universal love from literally everybody he ever met. i cannot think of any other celebrity that had so many fans and so few haters. even trump who bourdain openly loathed showed sadness learning of his death. i remember being taken aback by the trump clip, i don’t think i ever saw him express genuine emotion previously and never saw it since. bourdain was so likable, he could invoke emotion in a sociopath. however it didn’t matter- no amount of unrelenting love and validation could convince him he was a good person- that he was worthy of self-love. this is a fucked up thing to say since self-hatred is what killed him. i understand that it is devastating that none of us could convince him he deserved love. but much like he couldn’t alter his emotions i cannot alter mine. and the emotions i feel when thinking of him is comfort.
why?
because i find it relatable. i feel the same way.
i want to spend my birthday alone. lonely. awash in self-loathing. i am human and i know it feels bad. i know i do want the opposite as well. but i prefer this bad feeling. because it’s familiar.
in korean the word for something or someone who feels familiar is 정 (jung). i wrote about the word 정 in my book and i described it as non-translatable to english. which seems wrong because it literally means … familiar. but there is a tiny nuance: in english when you say something is familiar, there’s acknowledgment that this thing is a new thing, this person is a stranger, but merely feels like something or someone previously encountered. in korean, saying something/someone has jung has the effect of saying this thing is actually my home or this person is actually in my family and i just forgot. it’s the opposite of the uncanny feeling. it’s meeting a stranger and saying, ‘my brother i have forgotten that i have known you my entire life.’
anthony bourdain had 정. we all knew him from before. we just forgot until we saw him on tv.
my brother i have forgotten that i have known you my entire life
when i was a small child i was left alone. it took years for me to realize that during this time i was in an intense amount of fear manifesting in sadness and anger. i went most of my life thinking i was completely fine since i was in no immediate danger and forgot that during that time, i was in a constant state of panic and anxiety which i learned to disassociate from. i find it hard to feel pity for myself when imagining myself as a 6 year old child left alone, but i feel immense sadness at the kittens we had at the time who were also being neglected. they were the children of a feral cat we adopted named sunshine from the uninhabited island managaha.
after ‘adopting’ her my parents found out she was pregnant. she had her kittens one night in my bed. we lived in an apartment compound on the second floor with a back balcony. my parents cut out a hole in a cardboard box and put sunshine and her kittens in it and placed it on the back balcony. we had to keep the door closed because of the air-conditioning and during this time, sunshine became somewhat feral again, roaming the neighborhood and just coming back to nurse her kittens, eat kibble and drink water. she seemed happy with this in-between existence: accessing the best of feral life and domesticated life.
soon, the kittens started leaving the box to explore the balcony. one day 2 of them fell out through the large gaping holes between the rails. since we were inside with the door closed, my sister and i didn’t notice until our downstairs neighbor screamed.