In his book All Over but the Shoutin,' Rick Bragg shares a brief story about a bird to show just how devastating self-hatred can be. He writes:

Once when I was little, I watched one of the birds attack its own reflection in the side mirror of a truck. It hurled its body again and again against that unyielding image, until it pecked a crack in the glass, until the whole mirror was smeared with blood. It was as if the bird hated what it saw there, and discovered too late that all it was seeing was itself.