7.1 Becoming the kind of person you're taken with
It’s easy to find a spiritual guru who will tell you…
You’re fine just as you are.
In fact…
You’re perfect as you are.
Even better…
You’re perfectly lovable just as you are.
So no need to change…
Just be yourself.
But I remember what I was like in my 20s and I was not fine as I was. I was a mess. I was not happy with myself. I didn’t love being me. And, in fact…
I was not lovable.
I know that’s harsh, but it’s not a condemnation of myself. It’s the simple truth. My church made me unlovable.
I believe I was…
Always worth helping and fighting for.
As is anybody.
But that’s not the same thing as being lovable. An important difference. If someone had managed to convince me my 20–something self was perfectly fine, I might have stayed trapped in my unhappiness.
Back in those early years, those sad years, I got hooked on self–help programs…
They promised self-love quick and easy, and I wanted that.
Who wouldn’t?
For example, I heard about a workshop leader who said he could deliver self–love and all you had to do was just show up. So on a Saturday morning I caught the bus across town to his daylong event where he fired off crisp imperatives in his booming voice: Just do it! Take the leap! Believe, and self-love is yours!
In the weeks that followed, I tried to use his pushy kind of willpower to love myself, but my heart was not convinced. I wanted something more generous and less forced.
Undaunted, I went to a training on affirmations. The idea was to barrage yourself day and night with whispered repetitions of I love you until your resistance broke and you tumbled happily into actual love. By the end of the first month, though, I felt like I’d turned myself into a fast–talking con man.
Undaunted still, I went to a Sunday afternoon gathering in a dimly lit community center led by a striking woman with greying hair who sat in a draped easy chair and was flanked by tall vases of crimson amaryllis. She spoke in hushed tones to her devotees sitting cross–legged on the floor at her feet while the rest of us, perched on folding chairs at a medium distance, listened in like eavesdroppers.
She said there’s a shard of the divine in each of us. Find that and love it and that’s how you love yourself. In the moment, in her presence, I considered it, but when I tried it on my own at home, I couldn’t pull it off. I guess I was set on loving my own personal self, not a surrogate.
I persevered, checking out one program after the other, but my diligence backfired. Easy–step programs are supposed to be so simple any idiot could do them. But I was flunking them, so that meant I was something worse than an idiot. Which only served to deepen my well of self–hate, which was already deep enough.
Now, if you’re ontologically unlovable, if that’s the constant bass line of your life, and if it sucks all your escape melodies back into its sad gravity, then why wouldn’t you develop a self–hate so cellular that any sloganeering guru would be laughably outmatched?
But I had it easy.
What if you’re one of the people our society has chosen to hate? What if from the moment you’re born millions of your fellow citizens hate you because of the color of your skin? What if those haters are so trapped in racial spite they’re actually able to hate you when you’re a little baby?
Or what if you’re born gay? You get a pass as an infant, but later on, the very minute your gayness becomes visible, millions take that as their cue to begin hating you and hurting you before you’ve even had time to figure out for yourself who you are.
What if your society gives you the total treatment? What if it bombards you with the background radiation of disregard, punctuated by blatant attacks, supported by an institutionalized system of abuse, inside a culture designed to get you to turn society’s hate into self–hate? Then along comes an eager guru who pressures you to, “Love yourself! Just do it!”
Really? Breeze through massive, mulish hatred in an instant on command?
And then there’s the trouble we all share. If we want to love ourselves down to the bottom of who we are, that means we’d have to love ourselves to the bottom of our operating system because that’s the core of our being. But…
It’s the source of human evil.
And how are we supposed to love that? I can’t and I won’t. I won’t cozy in with an OS which causes so much destruction and pain. And this leaves me in an impossible bind…
I can’t love myself completely unless I know myself completely, but once I know myself completely, I can’t love myself.
Except, what if you quit trying to love yourself to the bottom of your humanness? What if you put in the work it takes to reject all the damning messages your society aims at you? What if you reject the multitude of pressures to fit in? What if you decide to…
Just love yourself to the bottom of your own heart.
What if you choose to love the tenderness and fight in you…
The most you part of you.
As opposed to the tribal part of you evolution gave you along with its inescapable evils.
My obsession with love, which began in childhood, caused me to put in years of dogged personal work to make of love something that would finally include me. And as a result…
There are now days when I can say I love myself.
And…
Say it as a simple matter of fact rather than as an aspirational wish.
I’ve come to this late in life, but for a boy who at a young age became a virtuoso of self–hate, getting to self–love at all is a very long way to come.
To be tender with myself, to know that I’m not impossible, this is enough and I’m at peace. I’ve become the kind of person I find myself drawn to.
It’s not like I’m ever going to be madly in love with myself. But after years of wishing I could be someone else, I’m now okay with being me. And sometimes I notice…
I’m even a bit taken with myself.
It’s not all the time, but I have my moments. I feel shy about saying that out loud but it’s true.
And sometimes…
I fall into affectionate communion with myself.
Which I don’t know how to talk about more than to name it and to affirm that if anything is a state of grace, this, for me, is it.
