My mind is a hollow place, but there is no echo; Therefore I fill it with courtiers, that they might repeat my thoughts back to me. But they are primate fops, and reflect nothing faithful to the simple laws of acoustics. Thus I have never heard nor spoken my own thoughts, and neither have you, though every moment I feel the purity of their truth, and mistakenly associate that feeling with my words, while the truth shines out into dark space, as invisible as the light which passes between the stars above us.

That’s not self-loathing you’re thinking in there. Your internal monologue is made to recite cues from its models of various aspects of your social environment. That’s some other asshole telling you you’re a piece of shit. Tell it to go fuck itself.

Always remember that your conscious/linguistic mind evolved to process your social environment, not to understand objective reality. Our instincts were already there to handle survival a billion years before the human ego, and formal logic is a sub-section of the social mind that a couple people just happened to have tuned properly; Your thoughts at large are a complex system of delusions tailored to your culture.

Don’t let their lies ruin you. You don’t even need to give them sisyphean counter-arguments. They’re not waiting to be answered; They’re cues for how you think certain other people might think. Let the spirits tear the flesh from their bones.

A response I just gave to someone asking about the nature of certain people like Clyde, who was making uncalled-for criticisms of the person’s artistic choices and heavily berating them for not taking art seriously enough:

There’s a very deep connection between what’s going on with a person’s body and their mind, especially how certain stressors which alter a person’s mood, if chronic, can have an effect on their whole personality. So if Clyde, say, has had a lifelong problem with explosive diarrhea, not only would the discomfort itself distract him from a well-balanced mode of thought, but the way he has to handle that problem taking up constant mental processing power will shape his brain according to that paradigm. So with diarrhea, he has to spend an inordinate amount of effort keeping his asshole tightly closed, constantly worrying about the possibility of any leakage ruining his day. The expression “tight-ass” is a very appropriate metaphor, and the term “anal-retentive” is an actual psychological term coined by Freud, which refers to very early childhood experiences in potty-training difficulties which has given the person a basic mindset to be paranoid about any kind of uncontrolled messiness, so they end up being compulsive perfectionists trying to keep everything, physically and ideally, in some kind of order.

So this might just come down to Clyde lashing out at you over irritable bowel syndrome.