The idea of self-love eluded me.
I heard it mentioned often, but I just couldn’t figure out what it meant, and what it looked like for someone to love themselves.
My first confusion was that I believed love was meant to be exchanged between two people, not that you would give it to yourself. I didn’t understand how you could give that to yourself.
I figured maybe self-love was something you resort to when you couldn’t find anyone to love you. This misunderstanding was fueled by my observation that people usually start talking about self love when they are working to recover from a heartbreak.
I tried to look for examples of self-love in people who were not in a personal criss, but the closest I got was finding people who were so full of themselves that everyone else disappeared for them.
None of that sounded good to me.
The only version of self-love I was willing to get behind was self-care. I had seen my mother and other women in my family work selflessly to the bone with minimal recognition or validation. Despite my pleadings, they wouldn’t stop. As a matter of personal retaliation early on I had made a decision that I’m not going to take care of myself when I grow up.
Self-Care Isn’t Self-Love
Life and exposure taught me that no amount of self-care can make up for the lack of regard, honor, esteem, and love for yourself.
Take my client whom I will call Louise to protect her privacy. Louise went to the best schools, was an excellent student, and an even better professional. As if that wasn’t enough, Louise received validation and notoriety in the form of accolades and awards to recognize her accomplishments and contributions.
In every way possible Louise had created a life most people can only dream of. She was so committed to creating a calm within herself that despite being a married mother of two with a full social, entrepreneurial, and philanthropic calendar she had used her resources to create a life that included a regular routine of the most bespoke luxuries self-care could offer. Yet when she came to me, she was distraught and confused.
It feels like a facade, she said. I feel fake and dirty. I am intentional to check in and see if I am doing something that is against my values, so I know that’s not it… it has to be something else…
Cognitively Louise knew how blessed she was, and yet she didn’t feel lucky. She felt restless, anxious, and haunted from within. The glossier the reality of her outer world, the more aware she became of how it contrasted with the reality within her.
For a long time I have had a feeling of emptiness and incompleteness gnawing at me, surfacing from the edges every time I create space and silence for myself.
If I’m being honest, some of the projects I accept even when I know I don’t want to, and the way I throw myself into work feels like a constant race to shut this feeling out before it shuts me out.
I thought: if I create this, if I have that, if I do this, if I give that away, ‘then’, maybe then, I will feel okay. After a momentary satisfaction, I’m back to where I started from.
The more I accomplish, the more checkboxes that get marked, the more I run out of hope that anything will ever change.
The truth is that no matter how bespoke your self-care, no matter how far and hard you run away from what is within you, you can’t run too far. As Thomas Kempis said, “Wherever you go, there you are”.
Read the next part of the Self-Care in the next Newsletter: Self-Love is Not Narcissism.