The Path to Self-Love

Root 8 - Suggestions for those who don't love themselves as they ought to.

In “The Importance of Self-Love,” I wrote:

Sometimes I witness someone else having experiences that remind me (how I used to think), and all I want to do is pull them over the line from their Part 1 to their Part 2. Because here on the other side is a peace and a joy I could never have fathomed before. I want so much to share that peace and joy with others. That’s part of why I started this newsletter. Maybe somewhere along the way I can put enough words out there to convince others to love themselves the way I’ve learned to love myself.

Perhaps if you’re reading this, you’ve struggled with loving yourself. If you’re anything like I was, you don’t know where to start. How does one go from self-loathing to self-love? I’m no expert, no magic guru. All I can offer you is a story: the story of how I went from my Part 1 to my Part 2. Though doubtless my journey will look different from anyone else’s, my hope is that by sharing my story, you might find some clues pointing to where yours can begin.

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I hated myself. I felt like a failure in almost all things. I was a disappointment of a daughter, of a wife, of a mother. I had failed at the only thing I’d dreamed of being–an author. I was terrible at cleaning, at cooking, at keeping plants alive, at taking care of pets. The only thing I was any good at was learning. After going back to college, I was excelling in all my classes.

Perhaps that’s what motivated me to spend so much of my downtime investigating things I didn’t even need to know for class. Anything that got me curious, I would Google, I would read research papers on, I would get to the bottom of. I had self-diagnosed my toe fracture that way. When the doctor said they didn’t find anything in the first x-ray, I knew that missing a toe fracture in the first x-ray was quite common. When they found it the second time, I nodded. I already knew.

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

I had witnessed one of my friends leave an abusive relationship, and this sparked an interest in learning about relationships. What makes them bad? What makes them good? This is how I found Mark Manson. Best known for writing The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, he has an extensive blog where he writes articles about relationships, yes, but also philosophy, psychology, productivity, and culture. I pored over them, mainly reading the relationship articles, but sometimes reading the psychology ones as well.

One that I spent a long time chewing was “1,500 People Give All the Relationship Advice You’ll Ever Need.” Having been married for a decade, despite some desperately rough times, I was a bit full of myself. There were some relationship “don’ts” that caused me to think, “I mean, that’s actually fine.” There were some “dos” where I thought, “Right. As if that were how it worked.” I left that article thinking that some people were absurdly romantic and optimistic, and feeling a deep sense of unease.

Another article that caught my attention was “F*ck Your Feelings.” In it Manson discusses meta-feelings. How you feel about how you feel. And right at the top I found myself: feeling bad about feeling bad, or self-loathing. As for my then-husband, I couldn’t ignore how well the meta-feeling 3 matched his behavior. Feeling good about feeling bad, or self-righteousness. It wasn’t flattering for either of us. And, unfortunately, the article doesn’t offer much in the way of dealing with your meta-feelings. I mean, Manson says to stop ascribing too much meaning to what you’re feeling. But this leads us back again to the same question as “you should love yourself” does: How?

I think the answer for both may be: time spent continually grappling with it. Letting go of self-loathing is hard. Stopping yourself from investing so much meaning in your feelings is hard. It takes a lot of digging, a lot of grappling, a lot of work to figure out how to do it. And at the end of it, once you’ve “found yourself” or however you want to put it, it’s difficult to point to exactly what pushed you over the finish line. Digging into these articles didn’t do it on their own. They helped me identify the issue, which is a good step, but it was months after I read them that I began to love myself.

After I’d gotten started with them, I got on a kick of listening to and reading accounts from people who left cults. One guy left the alt right movement because he received friendly, loving attention from his black neighbors, and he couldn’t reconcile anymore his hatred for black people. That made a lot of sense to me. The way to change people’s minds isn’t to scream at them and call them names, no matter how atrocious their behavior. It is to show them your own raw, loving humanity. I watched a TED Talk about a woman leaving the Westboro Baptist Church for similar reasons. Eager for more of the same, I picked up an article by a woman who had left a religious commune (I’m not finding this article at the time of writing). This time, however, the author wasn’t converted by love from others. She was converted by love from within.

As a child, this woman had stood up for a classmate who was treated unfairly by their teacher, but bore her own unfair treatment in silence. She put her head down and was a good girl. Until one day, when she had an epiphany: I should be willing to stand up for myself the same way I stood up for my friend. So she left the commune, where she knew no one would treat her the way she wished to be treated. She put herself first.

I cried. I nodded my head and knew that this was wise. And in my own life, I continued to let myself be treated poorly. Things were clicking into place, though. I had started to wonder why, in arguments, I had to be the one to apologize. Why my then-husband never did. I started to think that didn’t seem right.

Then it was five months pre-separation, and he and I were flying across the Atlantic Ocean toward a vacation. I was bored. Having a lot of time to kill, I clicked through the movies available through the screen set in the seat back in front of me. I love romcoms, but hardly ever watched them because my then-husband did not. So out of everything I could have watched, I ended up selecting Isn’t It Romantic. This choice proved to be pivotal.

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t watched this movie yet, and you would like to (which I highly recommend), pause reading this and do so now. I’m about to spoil the entire thing. Still here? Okay. You’ve been warned.

In Isn’t It Romantic, the heroine Natalie has resigned herself to a life without love. No one ever notices her or appreciates her. She lives in obscurity. Until one day when she gets hit in the head and enters a coma, in which she’s stuck in a musical. In her quest to get to the end of the musical, she tries coupling up. First with the obvious male lead, then with the less-obvious love interest. Nothing works. Finally, she realizes that it doesn’t matter who she couples up with, as long as she doesn’t love and appreciate herself. It is by realizing she loves and appreciates herself that she frees herself from her musical hell, and awakens from her coma.

When Natalie goes back to work the next day, she has a whole new attitude. People try to not notice or appreciate her, as usual, but she stands up for herself. She walks in with confidence, doesn’t do anything that falls under anyone else’s job description, even when they ask her to, and she takes credit for her work–loudly. She turns heads. And, of course, in the end she gets the guy. But only after she loves herself, first. Because the love of another can’t fill the gaping hole inside you. Only your own love can.

This movie blew me away. I could feel things shifting inside me. I never did love myself. I had married in large part out of desperation that I’d never find anyone else to love me the way my then-husband had promised to.

He and I got to our destination, and we fought. We fought multiple times. Each time, after the usual flood of guilt and tears, I started thinking he wasn’t really being fair to me.

Then we had the big fight. 

This fight was sparked by my then-husband claiming something as fact when all evidence pointed against him. He would not back down. He insisted that I was wrong, and that I owed him an apology. I looked at him and felt I was seeing him for the first time. It was more important for him to be right than to be kind to me. It always had been. I knew that the only way for the fight to end was for me to capitulate. I did, but it rankled me to the core. I knew he’d been wrong, and he’d made me apologize for him to be happy with me again. I knew this was not okay.

I couldn’t get over it. We fought again on that same trip, on the very last day. We fought again a week after getting back. During that fight, I told him I thought we needed marriage counseling, saying we didn’t know how to talk to each other anymore. Inside I knew marriage counseling was our last hope of ever having a good relationship. I desperately didn’t want to be trapped in a bad relationship, or to divorce the father of my children. But he cinched the deal for us. He mocked my suggestion of seeking help.

In that moment, I knew then that our marriage was a sham. We were not united, not looking out for one another. I had been united to him, and I had been looking out for him, but he wouldn’t return the favor. I was holding on to a corpse of a marriage.

And still I kept going. I didn’t know what else to do. I kept going through the motions as if nothing had changed, even though I knew everything was wrong. It took about a month from that last fight, the refusal to go to counseling, that it happened. I woke up one day, walked outside, and knew. I loved myself. It had taken ages, and yet it happened all of a sudden. I loved myself, and I wanted to take care of myself. And that meant everything had to change.

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I don’t know the exact steps others should take to love themselves. I have some ideas. First, know that you, as you are right now, with no changes, are worthy of love. I don’t care what you’ve done, or failed at, or been. You are worthy of love. Second, you are the only person you are with 100% of the time. So of all the people who can show you love, you are the one who can make the most impact. If not you, then who else has the power to fill the void you feel all the time? Third, action prompts inspiration. When you’re in your head, stop and ask yourself if you would talk to a friend that way. If not, speak to yourself more kindly. Even if it feels strange at first. Practice the action of being kind to yourself, and the feeling of loving yourself might very well follow. After all, why would you feel kindly toward a person who is constantly on your case? For anyone reading this struggling with self-love, I hope this story and these thoughts might help you on your journey.

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Have you ever had to grapple with something for a long time before it clicked? Feel free to share below.