Loving

“It’s B.S. that ‘you have to love yourself before you can love someone else.’ Human beings actually learn how to love themselves from being well-loved in safe and trusted relationships. (A lot of us are re-learning how to let people care about us. The right people.)”

My initial reaction to this post by Allyson Dinneen (a.k.a. @notesfromyourtherapist) was “That’s not true! If I don’t get a handle on loving myself, then I’m just going to keep getting into relationships with people who end up being dismissive of me and my feelings.” And I think there’s truth to both her insight and my initial thought.

I’ve been thinking about loving myself in new ways. I was raised on the youth group sermons about loving myself as a creation of God, my body being a temple, loving myself as a stepping stone to loving others and God better. These are fine approaches in theory, but ultimately, loving myself was always in service to something outside myself. It was the step to rush through in order to achieve selflessness. Of course, this played out in my relationships. Once I started to feel good about myself, I’d get involved with someone who liked the idea of me better than the real me because, the truth is, I liked the idea of me better than the real me. Acknowledging and accepting my whole self is a new practice.

Looking at self-love through the lens of mindfulness and meditation practice has given me a much deeper understanding of the concept. It’s helped me get out of the mindset that tells me self-love is just a stepping stone to a “love” I can give without regard to my own personhood. I’m realizing how deeply I had internalized the message that I was created to serve, to help, to sacrifice and that any part of myself that didn’t contribute to those ends was to be cut off and burned in the fire. Even though I’ve spent years deconstructing the constraints of my upbringing, I wanted to be careful with this one because I still believe that love is generous. From a shifted vantage point, I’ve been able to see more clearly how to be a friend to myself, to treat myself and my feelings with loving-kindness, generosity, and compassion. It means not rushing through the uncomfortable feelings, as much as I want to just be done with all the difficult emotions that accompany heartbreak, loss, and my own sense of aimlessness or feeling out of place. Now I look at these uncomfortable feelings as teachers. Instead of running and hiding from them, trying to pretend they don’t exist, I accept their existence and pay attention to how they shed light over what I value.

When I was mourning the loss of my marriage, someone told me “You have to be enough for yourself.” I clung to that idea, but, instinctively, I knew it wasn’t the full picture. Yes, we’re born alone and die alone – no one lives those experiences for us or can tell us exactly what is going on with the mind or soul in those moments. But life is also lived in communion with others. Togetherness and solitude are essential for living in the same ways that inhaling and exhaling are essential for breathing. You could say the same for loving yourself and being loved by others. They go together.

I’m beginning to see this interdependence more and more. I have people in my life who love well, and I’m beginning to take the things they say about me at face value instead of watering it down with an internal retort of “Oh, you don’t really know how bad I can be” or “Well, I could be better.” Some of them do know how bad I can be! Some of them do know that I have room to grow! And it’s taken me too long to accept affirmation without that voice jumping in to negate it.

Lately, I’ve had these moments where I look in the mirror and I think, “Look at you! Look at how far you’ve come! You are strong and stunning!” Even in lower points, the times when I’m crying for some reason (heartbreak/grief, frustration with my aimlessness, exhaustion from those outsider-alien feelings that creep in) I’ll look in the mirror and audibly speak to myself like I might speak to a friend who is crying. I comfort her. Caring for myself this way has been a long time coming and I’m looking forward to how this love is going to grow and change, how it’s going to affect my relationships with others.

And I’m not just bringing that back to the youth group days where the purpose of my love for myself was about pushing myself aside, making space for others or the Divine. I’m recognizing that the love I have for myself now is going to prevent me from being in relationship with some toxic people. I’ve stood up for friends in toxic situations plenty of times, but rarely for myself. Becoming a friend to myself has given me a new strength to recognize and remove myself from toxic situations. It is good, but far from easy. In her book, All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks writes, “Wounded hearts turn away from love because they do not want to do the work of healing necessary to sustain and nurture love…To love fully and deeply puts us at risk. When we love we are changed utterly…We sacrifice our old selves in order to be changed by love and we surrender to the power of the new self.” We live in a world where loving yourself with honesty and bravery is a risk. But, I can tell you, it is a risk worth taking. 

It’s worth it to work against the lies we’ve believed about ourselves for as long as we can remember. Maybe these lies came from people who should have loved us well and didn’t, maybe they’re from the world at large or the particular sub-cultures that influenced our young minds, but whatever the source, what makes it so difficult to counteract is that at some point, those stories we were told became the stories we told ourselves about ourselves. It feels counterintuitive to be working against the self in order to love the self better. No one else can do this work for you, but, as my friend says, “it’s the greatest when they chime in.” It’s the greatest when we can chime in for ourselves and each other.

Chiming in and listening to the windchime song of another’s love for us takes vulnerability, it takes a willingness to give ourselves good gifts. I once told a loved one, “You deserve to give yourself good gifts. What are the gifts you didn’t get from your family that you can give yourself? Who are the people in your life who are a more authentic family? Authentic family brings you goodness, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to comfort. We can be comfortable with things that are harmful. How often do we stop giving ourselves the gift of vulnerability because it is uncomfortable? How often do we close ourselves to the goodness that comes to us because we believe the old lies that say we don’t deserve that or it’s good for someone else, but not for me? How many people never give themselves the gift of vulnerability as adults because it accompanied punishment in childhood? How have our wires been crossed so that we believe that good gifts like vulnerability and love are dangerous and that unhealthy patterns are good?” We have to ask ourselves these questions. It’s part of the process of re-learning how to open ourselves up to a love that allows us to be fully, honestly ourselves, to a love that is wide and embraces the necessity of togetherness and solitude.

If this all seems like too much, like an impossibility, I’ll leave you with another bell hooks quote (really, selecting only two quotes was editing myself, y’all just need to read the whole dang book):

In an ideal world we would all learn in childhood to love ourselves. We would grow, being secure in our worth and value, spreading love wherever we went, letting our light shine. If we did not learn self-love in our youth, there is still hope. The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite, waiting for the heart to awaken and call us back to the first memory of being the life force inside a dark place waiting to be born – waiting to see the light.