Working on Love: Self-Love
Lessons Learned, Part 1/2
I’ve been more thoughtful about my sense of love and my acts of love recently. Leaving a serious relationship and restarting life in DC has given me a great amount of solitude with which I can build myself. I think about a critical aspect of myself: my sense of love.
I recently mentioned reading Alain Badiou’s Happiness. The first book I read of his was In Praise of Love. Much of that book was rewarding. But this was year and years ago, and I have not really considered my sense of love until reading bell hooks last year. Also encountered in the same time frame as Happiness, her book The Will to Change and All about Love. These books put forward nourishing ideas of how I understand the love I gave and give along with how I avoided it or actively struggle to accept it still now.
This is a human challenge.
I accept this is the great task of life, and I welcome it. This, alone, is a tremendous feat of grace and self-compassion.
I am thoughtful of the lessons I’ve learned from love. In one instance, it is the apparent absence of it that I want to expose and explore with you here.
The hard work of therapy (really, the heart-work) has shown me I have fallen to a common and lethal miss-belief of love and it is this: I believe I must earn love.
How else can I say this? Maybe examples. There were frequent and distinct episodes of my younger life where I would take the dejection from love, relationship or obsession, and turn it into proof that I am not worth loving- yet. In my innocent attempt to understand pain, I tried to turn it into something practical. I worked out.
I remember looking forward to summer vacation in high school so that I could “return” better than ever before. I always had the deep intention to somehow undergo a radical transformation such that I would return to the school year changed and marvelous.
Here I realize, I was trying to instigate a sense of awe in place of accepting love. My younger self could not comprehend any other way to pursue attention and adoration but through rigorous physical work.
Unchecked, this idea carried me through early adulthood. Perfectionism was the rule I used to measure my readiness to love and be loved; that is, I was never fully ready or deserving of love.
Unchecked, this idea carried me into my next trial: intellect. Until I was the best read in my cohort during my time in school, I was not deserving of love. Looking back it is clear that I avoided the actual opportunities to connect with someone in pursuit of this misunderstanding of getting ready for love.
The assumption was that there was not there to love in the first place; thus I needed to build it before anything could happen. There is irony here, of course. But the continuing belief was that I needed to understand why I hurt so much, and it followed this syllogism: I hurt because I am lonely; I am lonely because no one loves me; no one loves me because I am unlovable; I am unlovable because there isn’t anything of myself worth loving; therefore, I must work on myself to make something loveable because if I were already worth loving then I would not be lonely and already loved by someone and not hurt.
The spiral was cruel and effortlessly convincing.
Maturity is knowing that two things can be true.
It is possible to be lovable and to be lonely. Love, surely, is too complex of a thing to be earned. It is given, and that is not something one has control over.
This belief prepared me for my most vulnerable moment, the first love. I’d like to share that reflection with you next week.
Trevor
