Being Loved Is Not Enough
There is no stand-in for self-love. No amount of being loved by anybody else will ever cover you if you don’t know how to love yourself first.
As a parent, I love my child, but my most important job is to give her the tools she needs to love herself. Because nobody–not even moi–can do that for her.
A parent’s love cannot replace self-love.
And nobody can give us the love we withhold from our own selves.
I have borderline personality disorder, and for most of my life, I have believed that I was nothing if nobody loved me. It’s taken so long to learn that being loved isn’t enough.
It can never be enough.
But you don’t have to suffer from mental illness to hold false views about love. Most people at some point assign value to themselves according to how loved they feel.
Or how unloved.
But you know what they don’t teach you in school?
That unloved is not the same as unlovable.
We think we are unlovable anytime we go unloved. As if love were this standard ration given out equally to all those who are worthy.
We are so fucked up about love that we don’t even grasp just how rare it can be.
Nobody can make you feel lovable, they can only love you. There are boundaries. Even unconditional love has sides. What you decide to do with that love is really up to you.
And if it turns out that nobody loves you at all, that doesn’t mean you’re to blame. It doesn’t mean you’ll never be loved. It simply means right now you only have… you.
Sometimes I hear well-meaning people talk about love, life, and loneliness. They make big claims about how you’re only successful if you are loved by others. Like all of your value is tied up in whatever other people think about you.
I have a problem with that definition because I know what it’s like to fall through the cracks. To be largely unloved, even as a child.
And to be penalized or shamed for an isolated existence in life does nothing good.
All is not fair in love and war. Some folks have a lot of love while others hardly get enough–even when neither party did anything to get there.
True and pure love may be fair, but the choice to love is hardly equitable. We love the people who tick our preconceived boxes. And step around others who don’t fit into any of our expectations.
Most of us make no effort to love the unloved, and why would we? In most cases, we are blind or unfeeling to their plight.
It’s easier to tell ourselves that unloved people must take the blame.
That’s one more reason why you must learn how to love yourself first. Otherwise, you’ll wind up thinking that outside love can save you.
None of us can realize our own worth if we’re waiting on somebody else to prove it. Nobody can do the inside jobs that belong to us alone.
If you’re not careful, you’ll let the world tell you what kind of life you can and can’t have all based upon your relationship status. They will judge you for not finding “your” person, but worst of all, you will judge yourself for being single as if it’s some fatal flaw.
It’s not.
See, the older I get the more I realize that most of us are mixed up about love. Most of us are lazy.
We love those who come across our path whenever it is easy.
We love easy.
And we love to love what somebody else loves too.
That means most of us have a problem letting things like popularity and appearance cloud our judgment in love.
We overlook what we don’t even try to understand.
We count out the unloved people by assuming they must be unloved for good reason. And then we fail to grasp our own good fortune if or when it turns out that we are (luckily) loved.
I think we want it to mean something when we find ourselves loved by somebody else. As if we did something amazing to become so damn valuable.
We want outside love to inform ourselves and everybody else that we are worthy, but the truth is that only self-love can do that.
So save yourself, dear soul.
Love yourself like only you can do. Make your own luck, make your own love.
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Being Loved Is Not Enough
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