The Struggle To Love Ourselves
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We know we should love ourselves. We know how important self-love is. We know we’re supposed to love ourselves before we love someone else.
We’ve been told these things our entire lives.
But even so, we can struggle to love ourselves. And the longer I’m alive, the more it seems like loving ourselves is such a difficult thing to do.
But for most of my life I’ve been confusing the concept of loving myself with something that’s impossible.
Because self-love never seemed like it was supposed to be work. My understanding of self-love only focused on my best qualities and ignored the parts of myself that were difficult to reconcile
And maybe, for those of us who struggle to love ourselves, that’s the problem. We don’t think it should be work. We think self-love should be our default setting that’s as natural as the sun rising every morning.
But what if it isn’t? What if it’s been dark for months or even years? What if we never thought about the concept of self-love as something that requires work? What if it’s actually something that needs to be built up, like a muscle.
Most of the time, we only want to love ourselves when it’s convenient. Only when we’ve identified something in ourselves that’s worth loving. Only when we look a certain way or act a certain way or feel a certain way.
But that’s not really love. It’s certainly easy, but love is rarely about what’s easy.
And ultimately, we think we want to love ourselves but what we actually want is to love ourselves if.
- If we were 15 pounds lighter
- If we had a better paying job
- If we didn’t possess unflattering thoughts about the obnoxious person sitting next to us on a cross-country flight
- If we didn’t have weaknesses and make mistakes
- If we never fell down
- If we were a better husband or wife or daughter or son or human being
- If we were who we’re supposed to be
And eventually, we keep adding to this list of ifs until we end up in a place where we can only love ourselves if we were someone else. If we realized unrealistic and impossible standards that no human being can live up to.
Of course, we have no problem loving the good things about ourselves. That’s easy. But we tend to get so dejected by our imperfections that we make ourselves miserable because we can’t fathom loving the things that are not easy.
And this might be why we’re struggling.
Because loving ourselves is about accepting and forgiving ourselves, not being perfect.
It’s not about being a person who doesn’t have a single flaw or who doesn’t feel something ugly or shameful from time to time.
Loving ourselves includes all of our flaws and imperfections and painfully human qualities. It’s about being okay with those things rather than hating ourselves for them. It’s about working to accept the fact that we’re not perfect, and attempting to love ourselves anyway.
Self-love includes the whole self. Even the things about ourselves that we find unsightly or detestable or that we wish didn’t exist.
And this is the work of loving ourselves.
For the longest time I thought that self-love was a quest to make everything about ourselves impossible to reject.
But the true struggle of loving ourselves is remembering that it’s just as much about being okay with the things that are difficult as it is about loving the things that are easy.
And because of this, loving ourselves isn’t entirely about love.
No wonder it’s been such a struggle.
