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didn't do) that they too found me as rotten as I knew myself to be. And so I was often left in the privacy of my own dreaded company. My best friends were the little pills I could rely on to knock me unconscious. I had neither the tolerance nor the strength to face myself, and I often chose the easy way out. Sedatives, tranquilizers, hypnotics—I lived for them. They provided me respite from the constant agony of my internal voice that asked, “What's wrong with me? Why am I so damaged? Why do I hate myself? What have I done to deserve this?”
    Sleeping was my only escape. And I did more and more of it.
    Sometimes I pushed the boundary too far—like the time when I swallowed enough hypnotics to probably kill a few buffalos. When I simply woke up a few hours later asking for coffee, I lost interest in testing myself that way again. But when I started realizing I was losing chunks of my memory, I knew I had reached my limit. I bumped into people on the street who talked about a party I had been at, and I had no memory of ever being there, nor the few days surrounding the event.
    After that, I decided to go from one extreme to another, giving up sedatives in favor of stimulants—various amphetamine-based pills that would kick my body and mind into action so I could move, talk, and think at lightning speed. I figured if I kept moving, I wouldn't have to face myself. I was running away from the same problem, but I thought I'd found a better way of doing it. Stimulants helped me manage my social phobia. Whenever I went to a social event, I felt tremendous pressure to appear perfect. Every meeting, every interaction I had with people, was a performance. Drugs helped me feel more comfortable in my skin than I really was, but I felt false, and I hated myself for it.
    I tried to exude confidence and charm. Many times, I succeeded. But always, I would spend the ensuing days beating myself up for every little incident I imagined had exposed the “rotten” me to the world. I began to feel the rage that had been suppressed for a long time. Somehow it didn't frighten me the way my other emotions did, so I took refuge in it. After suppressing my emotions for so long, I found it quite empowering to act out my aggression.
    Acting out gave me a sense of power I'd never had. Now I can see that it's something I call “false power”—a false sense of power that's followed by feeling bad or dissatisfied because it comes from a place of fear. Soon, I was back to sleeping pills and began alternating them with the stimulants, one countering the aftereffects of the other. I was addicted to both not moving and moving too fast.
    Then one day it occurred to me that maybe there was another place to look for the joys that had eluded me all those years. Whereas my options before were limited to the world I saw myself to be trapped in, somewhere in the middle, between not moving and moving too fast, there was a whole world of magical possibilities. I spent years trying to find easy access into this other world. I dabbled in a variety of spiritual practices—meditation, energy healing, and slower movements—but lacked the patience to persist when a door wasn't opened immediately. Yoga was too slow, Pilates too brutal, meditation too boring. I judged everything harshly. Some things were too wacky; others were not wacky enough. It reflected my mind, which had been swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to the other, struggling to come to a balance. But I did not give up. Slowly, I was finding beauty.
    I learned that the other side of pain and false power is authentic power. Paradoxically, the place where I was to find the joys that had been missing was the very place I'd been running from all my life. When I reconnected to the parts of me that I had lost, it felt like a coming-home. I learned that self-love is when we come home toourselves. That relationship which I had sought to destroy turned out to be the very thing that would save my life in