“Real self-love”: On finally cultivating an intimate relationship with my heart
I’ve been thinking a lot about self-love lately.
It started when two months ago, after a long stretching period of existential depression, I was visited by a lover from overseas. The two weeks that he was here were nothing short of magic — I was temporarily living life in technicolor as I “played house” with this wonderful human.
Then he left, because that’s what people do when they’re visiting from another country. And suddenly, everything about my life felt unbearably empty. I woke up every morning with an excruciating, dull, lonely ache in my chest. Did I really live my whole life like this until he and I met a few months ago? I wondered.
As the weeks passed, I began to notice that ever since his departure, I’d been abjectly avoiding being alone without something to do. In fact, I’d been doing this for most of my life. I’d been packing my schedule each day with friend-dates, real dates, and fun events … and filling in every remaining minute with personal tasks, like running errands and cooking dinner.
I’d also begun compulsively adding “white noise” to my life — always listening to a podcast or music while I did anything. In the moments when I truly had nothing to occupy me, I was scrolling through my phone and diligently completing crossword puzzles. Basically, I was actively ensuring every day that there was no moment in which I had to just sit with myself.
Because to be honest, sitting with myself felt dangerous.
A part of me knew that if I sat by myself in the quiet, I would come face to face with the giant void that was my relationship to myself.
version 0: the sensitive critic
Growing up, I didn’t have much of a concept of self-love. It wasn’t a value stressed to me — never once did I hear the words “you should love yourself” from anyone in my life, nor did I learn any practices through which to do so.
My one sense of self-love was tied to my ability to deeply feel my emotions as a highly sensitive person (HSP). While I sometimes felt embarrassment about my sensitivity, I also loved it, believing it made me “special” and gave me a deeper experience of life than other people had.
But while I loved that one part of myself, I unconsciously criticized every other part. For most of my life (read: until I started meditating), I wasn’t even aware that I had an inner monologue or that it was constantly attacking me. Even if I had noticed, though, I wouldn’t have considered this a problem — I was just “holding myself to a high standard.” I carried a quintessential perfectionist’s mentality, and it brought me great success in life: straight As, an Ivy league degree, a top-tier corporate job. I was subtly and unconsciously destroying myself, but no one would ever guess it by looking at my life.
…and then two years ago, without warning, my body went on strike.
version 1: self-love = a mission
In 2016, I woke up dizzy and tired one morning and ultimately spent seven months mind-numbingly sick. When allopathic doctor after allopathic doctor threw up their arms unable to tell me anything about the ailment that shook my bones, all I could intuit from my body was that I am emotionally at war with myself.
This was confusing — as a “feeler” I had always vigorously embraced my emotions, relishing the waves of joy, melancholy, inspiration, and self-pity. But what I didn’t realize was that I had unconsciously been avoiding certain emotions: rejection, loneliness, unworthiness, fear of the void. To avoid the feelings I didn’t want to feel, I had spent my life clinging to perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional eating, excessive exercise, and self-criticism in an effort to numb myself or make myself “good enough” to never experience the scary feelings of loneliness or rejection.
But these habits that I was unconsciously using to avoid bad feelings were making me sick.
Armed with this revelation, I set out to cure my illness by “loving myself” and “feeling my feelings”, bringing to this mission the determination and ruthlessness that had taken me so far in life. I recited affirmations to myself in the mirror every morning like a soldier. I meditated daily. I filled my Instagram feed with cliché self-love quotes on picturesque backgrounds. I diligently journaled about my childhood wounds. I used EFT to force myself to cry out my feelings at least once a day. I created a checklist of healing modalities and tried them all. And eventually, the illness receded. It seemed that with my forceful approach, I had figured this self-love thing out. I had approached it like a battle, and I had won.
version 2: self-love = radical friendship
But now, two years later, I’ve been feeling unwell again, and this illness — combined with my longstanding pattern of unhealthy attachment to the men I date — is calling me to audit my self-love. It’s clear something’s missing: I’m not giving myself enough love, so I keep attracting men who are also not able to give me the love I crave.
At first, this realization felt bewildering. “I do love myself!” I thought. “I’ve been on a self-love journey for three full years now. I do affirmations in the mirror and meditate and practice yoga. Damn well I love myself!”
…And yet here it was, this inarguably empty feeling inside when I contemplated being alone. Myself felt like … nothing. A terrifying nothing. Love has to have an object, doesn’t it? What could it even mean to love this empty space that is me?
Last week, I finally found a piece of what it might mean. After work on Tuesday, I arrived home at my apartment with that familiar uneasy feeling, thinking, “uh oh, you’re about to be alone … here it comes …” But this time, instead of immediately busying myself with a task or distracting myself with my phone, I walked straight to the couch and sat down in silence. I took a deep breath and focused on the physical sensation of uneasiness in my body.
All of a sudden a guttural cry erupted from somewhere deep inside me, and soon I was sobbing. I instinctively caressed my arms and legs to soothe myself, and then I heard my body tell me to lay on my side on the floor. This direct message startled me, and so I started talking to my body out loud. I asked her to tell me about what she was feeling. This felt foreign and confusing at first — who was talking to whom in this situation? How was I holding up both parts of the conversation?
But it soon became clear that the part of me that is awareness itself was soothing and listening to the part of me that is this human character, Sophia, with messy needs and emotions. I guess when people say “self-love”, maybe that’s what they mean — the enlightened part of you giving compassion to the childlike part of you that’s actually physically struggling through this lifetime.
I talked my way through my storm of emotions, sobbing all the way, naming each emotion as it came up and hugging myself through the process of feeling them all — grief, frustration, existential fear. The dialogue sounded something like this:
Higher self: It’s ok, it’s ok (rubbing shoulders). Tell me about what you’re feeling.
Body (through tears): Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. I’m so scared. Fear. Fear. Fear.
Higher self: (Nods vigorously and compassionately) It’s so valid to feel that. I get you. Life’s really scary sometimes. What specifically do you feel afraid of?
Body: — long teary pause — I’m scared that nothing matters. That life is a void. That *sniffle* I’ll never feel full and whole by myself. That everything is out to criticize and hate me. That I’ll never feel truly “at home”.
Higher self: (hugs self, rubbing arms) Yeah. That fear is so valid. I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m here. I’m feeling this with you.
It had felt new and weird, but after 15 minutes of loving touch and dialogue with my poor body, the fear subsided. And know what’s wild? At the end, without forcing anything, self-love just poured out of me. I found myself saying to myself, “I love you so much. I love you so much.” Over and over again it came out, in waves of compassion for myself. “We’ve been through some shit. I know. I know, it hurts. It really hurts. It’s okay to be scared, it’s scary. It’s so valid. It’s okay, just feel it. Feel it all, I’m here.”
And every time I’d talk to myself like that, something amazing happened: Every cell of my body lit up like a Christmas tree, energy releasing with resonance, my body saying thank you for understanding, finally. Thank you for validating me and giving me permission to just be where I’m at. For the first time in my life, it felt like every part of me was on the same page.
As I’m building this deeper friendship with myself, I chuckle remembering my old interpretation of “self-love”, back when I was curing my illness. Self-love then was a project — it was “fixing the problem”. I’d feel a difficult emotion in my body, and I’d sit there pressuring it to come out, practically yelling at it. I treated my body like a crying baby, desperately shoving things at it to force the feeling out and have it be over. The monologue would usually go something like this:
“UH OH, WHY ARE YOU SO ANXIOUS? DO YOU NEED FOOD? HERE’S A BANANA. NO? IS IT THAT YOU’RE THIRSTY? HERE GULP DOWN THIS WATER. NO? ARE YOU TIRED? JESUS CHRIST PLEASE JUST BE CLEARER.”
While that forceful approach ultimately didn’t lead me to true self-love, it did yield something valuable: the tools I found for feeling my feelings in the first place. Methods like EFT (tapping), Vipassana-style meditation, Focusing, and conscious movement continue to be precious resources to me. The difference is that now, I’m using them as a way to be with myself, instead of as a way to fix myself.
And maybe that’s what self-love really is, at the end of the day —not bath bombs and chocolate, nor counting all the external things I’m good at, nor “fixing” anything at all … but rather, just giving myself permission to be exactly where I’m at. Holding all of my states, all of my traits, and all of my feelings in the loving eye of pure awareness and compassion.
I’m realizing that loving yourself doesn’t require feeling overjoyed about every part of you (though if you can find a way to do that, more power to you.) No, it’s just about being able to look at every one of those parts, and say, “I accept you. You are a part of me.” And to the less savory ones, say, “You are hurting. It’s okay to be in this hurting state: to be human and imperfect and messy. it’s grand, this life thing, and I’m here with you.”
So what now? I sense that the road of self-love only gets more scenic from here. In addition to a steady diet of “I love you”s dozens of times a day, I’m telling myself the things I’ve been waiting for friends or romantic partners to tell me for my entire life. These likely vary from person to person, but mine are:
Your sensitivity is breathtakingly beautiful. You are so wise. Your desire for deep connection is so valid. Your life journey is so inspiring. I see you, I see your depth and it is so gorgeous, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I will never leave you.
And it’s crazy: My brain doesn’t know the difference between someone else telling me these things, and me telling them to myself. My body glows just as brightly as it would if it got these compliments from someone else. It’s drinking these words up like it’s been thirsty in the desert for decades. I tear up often, like my heart is saying, “Oh. There you are. I have been waiting for this kind of love for my whole life.”
Thanks to this work, my base level of self-esteem is rapidly upgrading. I am slowly but surely healing the roots of so many of my issues, rather than the branches. Instead of working to “fix my people-pleasing”, or “love people more”, or “speak more confidently”, those things just come naturally out of a firm base of self-love. This is revolutionary. I’m just getting started, and it’ll be a while until this is all firmly rooted, but I trust that the seeds are planted and the shift is happening, oh it’s happening.
For now, I’m taking the time to do nothing. I’m going slower. I’m no longer filling my life with white noise or compulsively doing crossword puzzles. Sitting with myself feels bearable now — in fact, it’s starting to feel like home.
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