“If you have to be shiny and superior to matter, then eventually you won’t matter at all, even to yourself. But you do matter. You are lovable and you matter. You deserve love. So love yourself, even when you’re pimply and depressed, even when you’re no longer queen, and then you won’t fall for guys who adore your sexy-badass marketing campaign but who don’t want a real human being in their beds…Give yourself a break for once, and you’ll feel less exhausted, less frantic, less anxious. ” — Heather Havrilesky
Originally I wrote this post in January in light of goals, 2020, and resolutions.
I was fourteen when I came across the concept of “radical self-love” from the blogger Gala Darling, and it changed my life.
She espoused concepts like taking yourself out on dates, buying yourself flowers, just doing things ‘cause they felt good, feeling complete on your own—it felt revolutionary to me at the time.
It created a newfound confidence in me, a resilience in the face of the bullshit I faced in junior high school.
But, unfortunately, not through the fault of radical self love school itself, this concept created a dark byproduct within my psyche.
It created a schism within myself. Consciously confident — but subconsciously, by definition unaware of how squishy and insecure I really felt.
It would create contradictions such as me adamantly extolling the virtues of going on movie dates by yourself, but being so insecure that I hadn’t had my first kiss by 18 (and so unaware of this insecurity) that I’d go on dates with very random dudes. Decent enough guys, but I had no business dating them.
(classic example of Attachment to the Timeline fallacy).
The other dark by-product of radical self-love? By painting the picture of radical self-love as self movie dates, flowers, baths, and whimsical wanderings—all of which is pretty awesome tbh—it obscured the other side to self-love, the side that matters much more.
The love we conjure for ourselves when we’re jobless, feel like a loser, have no friends, no “beach body”, C- grades, lots of debt, no boundaries, pimples arranged like they’re the constellation of Orion.
In other words, the way I took in radical self-love trained me to have conditional love for myself. This easily happened because the dominant programming out there is love with conditions.
It is easy to love yourself when you’re winning at life and your life is socially acceptable. But true love—that is to say, unconditional love—comes into play when the opposite is true.
I learned this via initiation through fire, when the circumstances in my life were such that when people asked the standard question of “What do you do?” I was at a loss for what to say. Without a shiny answer to fall back on, my self-esteem crumbled.
I hustled to get back to having a shiny, or even normal, answer, not understanding why I was so burnt out.
It was because the fuel of conditional love is not a sustainable fuel. When I refer to Wounded Whys, this is what I mean: doing things, at the root level, to gain love and acceptance. To compensate for something. To subconsciously rescue our inner child.
And uncovering Wounded Whys is difficult because they’re sneaky. It takes a deep investigation to uncover the real reason we pursue things. A useful line of inquiry can be, What story do you tell yourself about what kind of person you would be if you didn’t achieve the goal? Also–Wounded Whys can get mixed in with pure, intrinsic motivations—like I had for writing my book before it got entangled with validation/money.
So what to do, this goal-setting (and goal-besmirching) season?
Well, as much as conditional love is an unsustainable fuel, unconditional love is a magical fuel.
I came across this idea from Lacy Phillips, the idea of loving ourselves for our perceived shortcomings, not in spite of them.
“I love myself because I can be a pushover a lot of the times.”
“I love myself because I’m really unsure of myself.”
“I love myself because I have love-handles and a muffin-top.”
“I love myself because I’m squishy and uncool.”
Once we source that acceptance within ourselves, the wounded Whys fall away. A more pure motivation for pursuing things emerges.