I Hate Myself :) — I Feel Seen

A Personal Film Review

Reading Soundtrack - I made a playlist to listen to while reading or after

Spotify

Apple Music

I just finished watching Joanna Arnow’s I Hate Myself :) — it’s a new fave — and it left me feeling viscerally uncomfortable in a way that only honest art can. It made me reflect on my life, the people I have gravitated towards when I hated myself. From the very first scene with her parents talking down to her, picking her apart, dismissing her passions, it suddenly made sense why she would end up dating someone like James. The premise of the film was “is James a good person to date?”, but the more I watched, the more I was pulled into the world of Joanna. I was pulled into her mind. He may have been the subject, but it was her I was interested in.

What struck me immediately was not James’s charisma, but hers. Joanna frames, shoots, edits, and narrates her life in real time. She is the cinematographer, the subject, the co-editor. She chooses the angles. She chooses the repeated exposures of her own vulnerability. And she chooses what we see and what we sit with. That alone dismantles the infantilising reading so many people online have given this film — the idea that she is a helpless girl, a damsel in distress, too insecure to know better. She made the film. She pressed upload. That is agency, whether people like the shape of it or not.

The film refuses to give us a tidy ending. The final scene, where she becomes intimate with her ex again, isn’t disappointing — it’s realistic. And the sex scenes in this movie are so human. There are only two, but both hit me hard because I have been there.

The first scene happens after she’s already broken up with James. She starts belittling herself during sex, almost narrating her own worthlessness in real time, and then she cries after. The last scene is them having sex again. It’s not glamorous, it’s not triumphant, it’s not a lesson tied up with a bow — it’s honest.

It resists the poetic door-closing moment people crave. Real life is repetitive. Healing is repetitive. Cycles don’t break cleanly just because we want them to.

Watching it made me think of my own life, and it made me feel less alone. It made me feel better for wanting people who hurt me; it kinda helped me let go. Because sometimes it’s not a dramatic walkaway — sometimes it’s a slow crawling.

And maybe that’s why this film hit me so deeply. I’ve been in relationships like this — plural, and not just with lovers but with friends and family too. Watching her arguments, the way he belittles her, cuts into her, the way she shrinks and swallows it — I recognised the shape of that harm. Not in some distant, intellectual way, but in the way your body remembers being spoken to like that.

I related to her more than I expected to, and maybe that’s partly why I feel so protective over how people are discussing her. 

I have been her,

over and over and over again. 

I hated myself.

Sometimes I still do.

What I keep seeing online is this shallow interpretation: “She’s so insecure.” “She really hates herself.” “This feels like a humiliation ritual.” It irritates me because it flattens her into a stereotype. It erases her complexity as an artist. It treats vulnerability as evidence of stupidity rather than intention. And it distances viewers from their own capacity to end up in similar dynamics. People love to pretend they would never tolerate what she tolerated, because it makes them feel safe. It makes them feel superior.

It could never be me.

 But the truth is: anyone can end up in a harmful relationship, especially when you’ve grown up being nitpicked by people who are supposed to love you. Begging, compromising for love becomes normal.

The most uncomfortable part of all this is that viewers seem to talk about Joanna as if she is still living inside the film. They speak about her heartbreak as if it is happening right now, as if there is no distance, no growth, no artistic intention. But the film is twelve years old. She has gone on to make more work, grown as a filmmaker, built a career. She is not frozen in her saddest moments — the audience just wants her to be, because it makes the reading easier.

Meanwhile, James — who is openly racist, is not even spoken about. Everyone in the film and people reviewing the film have more heat for her than they do for him. At the open mic where he openly uses the N-word, is anti-Semitic, and inflammatory as a joke, as free speech, as a form of artistic expression, they still describe him as a “good guy.”

It was harrowing. Joanna asks the older Black woman if she thinks James is a “good guy.” She says yeah — and then, as she says that, he starts shouting the N-word in his performance. The lady gets uncomfortable and goes “I hate that he uses that word though.” She reprimands him but even then she says, “I know you’re a good guy, but you’ve got to stop with that.”

Because if someone can scream the N-word, belittle his partner, claim “free speech” as a shield, but still be labelled “good,” then maybe our entire idea of “goodness” is a performance — a veneer that protects harmful people more than it protects the people they harm. And that raises a bigger question the film itself asks: What is a good man? Who decides? What do we allow charisma to excuse?

It’s kinda like: he is a dick, so we are mad at the woman. She is his keeper, she is his PR, she is who has to pay for his shitty behaviour.

The naked editor in the film even blames her — saying obviously she likes this dynamic (sidebar: the editor is a prick). He tells her she must love it. She smiles, a smile of discomfort; she says no she doesn’t. He insists she does because she’s smirking. He keeps telling her who she is, telling her own feelings back to her. I felt her deeply in that moment. People do that to me all the time. They dissect me and tell me who I am when I never asked. She tries to express her boundaries, tries to set the line with a smile. I do it too.

I grit my teeth and I smile so I don’t make them uncomfortable — but they read it as I like it, like I’m playing hard to get, ignoring my literal words. 

Stop you are hurting me.

Watching the way the editor speaks to Joanna was also a mirror of the audience. His tone echoes the TikTok comments I’ve seen: a mix of disbelief, mild contempt, and the assumption that she must “like” the harm if she keeps returning. People love to diagnose women who are hurting, as if the internal landscape of shame and low self-worth is unfamiliar terrain. As if being harmed makes you naive rather than human. I will speak for myself: I knew what I was in. I did not want to be there. And that’s what made it hard to leave. This feeling — this disgusting feeling of knowing better and still staying, hoping for better but knowing it will get worse… and it did.

I think what bothers me most about the discourse is that audiences talk to her the way people often talk to women who have been harmed: with judgement disguised as insight, with “accountability” that ignores the person causing the harm, with a complete refusal to see vulnerability as anything other than weakness. 

With quotes of strength.

With speeches about self-love.

That logic shows up everywhere. We forgive abusers instantly as a society — we give them room to explain themselves, contextualise themselves, rehabilitate themselves — long before we give empathy to the person harmed. We centre the abuser’s humanity so quickly, while the harmed person is dissected, shamed, picked apart for every decision they made before and after the harm. There’s a constant search for something they must have done to deserve it.

It’s bullshit. And it’s violent. And it keeps people silent.

Because when you’ve been in those relationships, you learn very quickly that people want your harm to make sense. They want you to be the reason you were hurt — because then they can believe it would never be them. 

Until it is.

And maybe that’s why this film feels so necessary. It doesn’t give the audience a safe reading. It doesn’t tie up healing with a bow. It doesn’t flatter you with the illusion that you’re above the mess. It shows a woman who is complex, contradictory, hurting, witty, sharp, self-aware, self-loathing — and also a real artist. Not a victim archetype. Not an object lesson. An artist.

It is art that discomforts because it tells the truth. Art that exposes the precarity of being in relationship with others, with harm, with yourself. Art that reflects back a society that demands women protect themselves perfectly from predators while pretending violence is not embedded in everyday life.

And maybe that’s why the film made me reflect on myself — on the ways I’ve been belittled, on the harm I’ve carried quietly, on the times I said “I love myself” out loud while internally drowning in shame. It made me think about the gap between who we are and who we perform, and how much empathy we deny each other because we’re afraid to admit we’ve been vulnerable too.

I Hate Myself :) is not humiliation. It’s honesty. It’s messy healing, messy thinking, messy living. It’s discomfort as truth-telling. It’s a woman insisting on showing her life without making it palatable.

And I wish more people would ask themselves why that unsettles them so much.

Maybe the real question isn’t “Why did Joanna hate herself?” Maybe the question is: 

Why are we so disturbed by a woman showing the parts of herself we don’t show? 

What does that reveal about us? 

And beyond that — What do we believe goodness looks like?

Who gets to be seen as good?

Why?

There’s something profound, and profoundly uncomfortable, in having to admit that most harm doesn’t come from “evil men,” but from “good guys” — and that maybe “goodness” is far more complicated than any of us want to believe.

After writing all of this, I found myself thinking about the voice that told me I wasn’t worth anything — the voice that kept me in harm, the voice I thought was mine. I wrote this a while ago, and it feels like the right place to end.

Maybe I don’t hate myself

I feel at peace

finally

my mind is quite, well quite for me

thoughts of positivity

maybe i actually love me 

not a lie 

this time

i actually like my life

there used to be this voice

EVERYONE HATES YOU

its still there

just not so loud

the voice is quite now

i believe the compliments

i believe the love

i dont hold my breath

waiting for hate

i thought people was only nice 

because 

they felt sorry for me

that i was annoying

and the more ask

for reassurance 

the worse 

i felt

the voice said

THEY ARE LYING 

THEY HATE YOU

STOP ASKING

then i would ask

again and again and again

but now

i realise 

there no one else 

that will stop 

me hating myself 

but me 

so released my self

from the shackles

placed on me 

looked for the trace 

of the hate 

left in me 

when 

i got the 

root 

of the voice

i found my parents

the words

they said

hapazordly, 

maliciously,

by accident,

on purpose

the voice

was my parents

and as i put distance between

us

me 

and 

my parents

the voice its quite

it does get loud

but i find it 

easy to keep it low now

and it hurts

because at what cost have i 

found myself

i don't know man

i think it was worth it

-humankind can not gain anything without first giving something in return -

Fullmetal Alchemist - Have not watched, I just really like the edits i have seen

“We Thought It Was the Only Truth… | FMAB Quote Edit”