Several years ago I started the work of learning to reparent myself. It evolved into learning to actively love and adore myself like I was a precious baby life had gifted me. Bleh. But also, good on me. I’m dope.
You see, for a long time, I really just tolerated myself.
I wasn’t particularly mean or anything. And that seemed to be good enough. But then I would look at my life and wonder why it seemed like my enjoyment of my own existence left something to be desired. That didn’t seem to be the case for everyone, but it was a common experience. I just sought enjoyment and elevation primarily through connecting with experiences and spirituality, rather than “loving” myself. I couldn’t “love” me, yet it didn’t seem like a problem, because in the model I was given, I didn’t have to…
or perhaps I wasn’t supposed to.
I could love others or I could love the god in them, but to love myself was to have tall poppy syndrome or something of that nature. And actually, I started to notice how accepting the love I was given was actually something I myself wasn’t really doing.
I would appreciate the sentiment, but I would often respond with self-deprecation or dismissal without realizing that it could be experienced as a rejection of the love I was offered.
Somehow I was to love others as God loved them…
but I understood that I was not to love myself as god loved me. I was to have my goodness validated not by my experience of it, but by what other individuals offered me when exposed to it. Yet I was also to be unconcerned with whether or not I was being perceived as good. This is all quite convoluted, but the most important take away was that I was expecting others to accept love in a way that I, in practice, did not. Fully, deeply, and without rebuttal.
Not to say that I was demanding people accept the love I offer… But I was confused, perhaps because the idea that love is what people want resonated with me.. but in practice I couldn’t understand why so many of us rejected it or engaged dysfunctionally when presented with instances of its expression.
It was sometimes strange to notice how frequently it was hard for people to accept the idea that I or anyone else loved them(perhaps without a condition that they could understand or validate). It was also interesting to note that in this semi-christian environment many of us struggled with loving ourselves simply because we existed to be unconditionally loved by the divine(without some condition of validation, except that we indeed existed in the first place). It varied from person to person, but when I noticed commonalities between the thought patterns of myself and those who seemed to reject love I was in fact, faced my own hypocrisy. How could I expect people to accept love when I didn’t?
So.. I decided I would figure it out for all our sakes.
to be continued…
