Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
The key to humor is often self-loathing or sarcasm. In a sense, that's how self-loathing is made palatable.
Boys with a 'failure to launch' are invisible to most girls. With poor social skills, the boys feel anger at their fear of being rejected and self-loathing at their inability to compete.
I have a very healthy dose of self-loathing. But I think we all have a past of being whatever our story was, of feeling not good enough. It can propel you to work harder and do more, but it can also be a tremendous trap, and you can't see beyond it.
My last album as J. Tillman, 'Singing Ax,' that was really a premeditated death rattle of the aesthetic precedent I had set. I realized I wasn't creating spontaneously; I was enforcing all these parameters. I was too self-loathing or something, and there was this obvious dissonance between my conversational voice and creative voice.
What is most difficult is when the large part of me that is a narcissist grows weary and is overtaken by the self-loathing part that always lurks in the shadows waiting for an opportunity to shine.
Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.
I have a lot of what you might call creative self-loathing - I have pretty high expectations, and they seem to consistently be higher than what I'm able to accomplish.
I grew up very self-loathing. I was a phobic. I had anxiety. I had panic attacks.
A lot of the problems I had with fame I was bringing on myself. A lot of self-loathing, a lot of woe-is-me. Now I'm learning to see the positive side of things, instead of, like, 'I can't go to Kmart. I can't take my kids to the haunted house.'