Everything I’ve learned about self love

Her: Do you love me?
Me: Of course.
Her: Then you must love yourself, because how can you love someone else if you don’t love yourself?

 

Those were the wise words of my best friend in high school Kara. I always hated that logic. What I heard that day wasn’t that I obviously must care for myself in some way, but rather that not only do I not love myself but I also don’t have the capacity to genuinely love others. I have a real knack for taking things the wrong way.

I always thought self love was intrinsic and effortless. Some people loved themselves but I did not. It’s not that I had done anything “wrong” per se in the morality sense. It was that I had a natural disdain for myself. A sense of worthlessness. I was steeped in bouts of depression from a young age and could never figure out why. I was always reminded that my circumstances were good and that I should be grateful. “There is nothing wrong with you.” was not to uncommon to hear shouted at me through the frustration of a parent or friend. But somehow on the inside I always perceived myself as wretched. It wasn’t until my adult life that I would describe the feeling as being discarded trash. A sentiment of failure and grief that relates back to unprocessed feelings of my adoption. It wasn’t until now, at age thirty six, that I have begun to realize that self love isn’t a state it’s a set of actions.

I originally was going to write about everything I know about romantic love being that it would be fitting for Valentine’s Day, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that I really don’t know much about romantic love. I have had romantic pursuits. I have made an attempt to supplement my lack of self love with the love and attention of another person, so yeah I’m that cliche of a man, but those attempts were all in vain and have very negative side effects.

Outsourcing love has been my specialty from a young age. Your parents can’t raise you, get adopted ones. They’ll love you. Still not enough? Attempt to make yourself lovable by being funny so that way people are happy to see you. Haven’t gotten your fill yet? Maybe try a woman. Her love will “complete you”. Still unsatisfied? How about adultery? Or maybe you can get divorced and attempt win the love of every woman that shows you the time of day? Is romantic love causing youproblems with expectations your continuously fail to live up to? Maybe just befriend a series of women and hope they all feel a sense of pity for you.

Alas, these are all real attempts that I’ve made. I was trying to outsource the love I couldn’t find for myself. I am reasonably good at it too. I cringe to write it but most people think I’m pretty great. They even tell me, to my face. They listen to me and offer me sentiments of encouragement, but neigh has it ever been able to sink in to my soul. It just bounces off of my defenses with the sound of sputtered laughter. “Sure, you think that now.” I would lament internally “I know I’m wretched garbage”.

Attempts to outsource love had failed me. It intrinsically made me dependent on the person or set of people for me to feel good about myself. This lead to some problems. I had to always ensure I remained lovable. I could never express myself in a way that would lead to the other persons disapproval. If you’re unaware this leads to expending a lot of time and energy doing things you might not really want to do. I did those things because I didn’t want to lose the attention of my outsourced love. This of course sets an expectation of those behaviors. The further down the rabbit hole I go the more I have to continue to shutdown my sense of self to be the character that is worthy of affection.

“Your problem is over committing.” my friend Dave said to me in a matter of fact tone. This is an under statement. Over committing has a ringing sense of time management to it. Maybe even effort management. My over commitments were not only bound to time and effort, they had emotional commitment and legal components to them to. By the time I was twenty two I had: mortgaged a house, gotten married, set out to start a career, still played startup software developer on the side, and a plethora of hobbies. All of this because if I slow down I might realize how much I’d have to listen to the internal monologue of how much I hate myself.

The woman I married is a great person. I regard her as an everyday saint. She’s a beautiful artist who has fiercely pressed forward through a decade of cancer starting at the ripe young age of twenty four. While she was a delightful person, I was rotting on the inside. Just a little bit everyday. She was a fantastic person to pick to spend the rest of my life, but I was wrestling with the concept of spending the rest of my life with myself. Despite how wonderful she was I couldn’t help but think to myself “I better take this opportunity because no one else will ever want me.” While not the only motivator for getting married it certainly was a sour one.

All the things listed above are self centered attempts to utilize other people to do one thing and one thing only, make me feel better about myself. Validate my existence. My soul was Swiss cheese and I relied on everyone else to fill the gaps. I was outsourcing love. I was trying my hardest to get what I received to saturate through my pores and down into my empty soul, but despite my best attempts I was still, at my core, bone dry.

I have groan to learn (haha) that self love can not be “outsourced”. I cannot compensate for my self hatred through the love of other people. I cannot compensate for my self hatred through the love of LOTS of other people. I have made a best effort in ruling this out. The irony being that the more I relied on other people to help me solve this problem the more I grew in dependence on them and the further I was removed from loving myself.

I have learned that self love, if not intrinsic, can be attained through a series of actions. These actions don’t have to be cliched items such as having a spa day. Although it might feel nice in the moment the feeling dies when it splats against wall of reality. I have found that for me I can basically break down self love into two main categories. Not screwing myself over in the future and growing in compassion for myself in the past.

I have always screwed myself over and it always starts with internal dialogue. It is a voice inside that tells me I am not enough, not good enough, and completely undeserving of a happy life. This began in childhood. I would be told I’m adopted because “my mother loved me so much that she wanted me to have a good life.” and an inner voice would tell me “She did it because she didn’t want anything to do with you. She wanted to be happy and couldn’t do that with you around” A person would say “Your a smart kid” and an inner voice would tell me “They say that because you’re retarded, because you can never tell a retarded kid that they are retarded.” Soon enough every compliment I was given was met with me looking for the negative, the shadow side of what they were saying and applying that internally.

The point of resurrecting such vicious internal voices is that it is my choices that have dug the holes in my life. It is the stories I have told myself, not reality, that have made it so difficult to love myself. The tricky part about manufacturing these types of lies about myself is that they take a great amount of effort to dispel in the future, especially because there is no external visibility to the rest of the world that it is occurring. Every lie is a link in the chain that is built on a previous lie and it is this chain of lies that binds me to my despair.

So how do you correct such a thing? It’s like attempting to break down an Egyptian pyramid from the top down using a hammer. To be honest I don’t think I can put words on the entire process. I have lots of self reflection, worked with therapists and gone through a recovery process from drugs and alcohol, so it’s an amalgamation of sorts. The thing that I have taken away from all of that is that I am my habits. I am what I practice everyday.

I have both good habits, albeit few in the beginning, and I have had a deluge of bad habits. These habits often set me up for failure. I would drink, drug, eat, or screw my way out of having to experience my self pity. As I started to knock each one of these items off of my list of options I had found a new sense of despair. The problem with eliminating a bad habit is that it leaves me with an absence of a coping mechanism and without it I am in pain.

There is a universal coping mechanism that can be used to compensate for all bad habits. It can be used in the face of my self pity and it can replace my need to drain the love out of others and action is, duh duh duh, helping others. It sounds completely lame, and as far I was concerned when it was introduced to me it was completely fucking lame, but it’s true. Making my best attempt to help, care, and love other people has changed my entire life. It has changed how I see myself. It has changed how I see others. And believe me, I had to be well beaten down to try it.

To be clear this is not the same as the character that I played where I would entertain others. Sometimes that would make them feel good, but it really came down to convince them to appreciate me. This has more to do with attempting to improve the life of another person independent of whether or not they praised me for it. To show and make my best attempt to be loving to other people despite how I felt about myself internally.

Why does this work you might ask? The reality is I don’t know. I think part of it is because it helps me stop being a shitty person and as a consequence I feel better about being a less shitty person, but that’s a shallow explanation. I think in reality a big part of it is that when I would show up to help other people I started to become a genuine person. I think the reason whenever other people would give me compliments or positive sentiments I just assumed they were as full of shit as I was. When I started to genuinely make the best attempt I could to care for other people I started to realize that those remarks I receive from others might be true, and ironically were no longer necessary.

As those stories about me started to dissolve over time the need to prove my awfulness started to slide away as well. My habits changed. I could now make room for loving myself through a series of actions in which I could set myself up for success that I was starting to believe, was maybe not what I deserved, but was possibly permissible by the universe.

Having made an effort at helping other people and starting to discover a reclaimed sense of deserving to be alive I then began to have compassion for my past self. When I was always striving to be lovable I always had a sense of failure because the old adage goes “you can’t please all the people all the time.” With a growing sense of genuine care for others I could now start to have a sense of genuine care for myself. A sense of realizing that poor guy was trying the best he can to navigate life without having all of the answers.

Like I said before, I am my habits. When I make a habit of draining others I grow in my capacity to drain myself. When I make a habit of loving others I grow in my capacity to love and as a consequence the capacity to love myself. And that is everything I know about self love.