Thoughts on Love of Self

I want to stay focused on the question: what does it mean to love myself?

It doesn't mean being able to acknowledge all my strengths, though I suppose that doesn't hurt. I know I have plenty of moments where I don't believe good things about myself; but I have as well many more moments where I do believe good things about myself. As my friend said, "You know you're hot shit."

But somehow knowing all the great things about myself doesn't matter. I do truly believe good things about myself, but however many good things there are, they are never enough. What is good when you could be better? What is good when along with all your strengths there are ever so many flaws?

So I am in the rather odd position of having, on the one hand, excellent self-esteem, and on the other hand, horrible feelings about myself. How do knowing that I'm great and feeling that I'm horrible add up? My friend helped me understand this: these two contradictory beliefs actually go in "different columns: being able to rationally tally up your strengths, versus viscerally loving yourself."

Ok. That helps. So I believe lots of wonderful things about myself, but somehow I am not able to relate those beliefs to actually *feeling good* about myself. Somewhere along the line, I think I lost the ability to feel good about myself.

I think--perhaps I'm wrong, but at least as far as I can see right now--I think that I have not felt good about myself in a very long time.

When I graduated from a prestigious, rigorous university with departmental and general honors, and was even selected to cross the stage with a small groups of students particularly noted for their achievements and potential....I felt nothing. I remember that day; it was gorgeous; I had family and friends; I'm standing there holding a beautiful and meaningful diploma; and I was thinking, "This is it? I don't feel any pride, any satisfaction, any joy....what did I work so hard all these years for?" Of course, my academic record gives me advantages; and the value of studying hard was that I learned a lot. But I wasn't able to feel good about myself for it, not on that auspicious day nor on any other.

At the end of the school year last year, I gave my students an evaluation form about my class. As I read their responses later in the day, I was amazed to see how much they believed they had gotten out of my class. Several (certainly not all lol) said that I had taught them to love history, that they had learned to think about race and racism differently, that they appreciated how I pushed them and believed in them and was patient with them; one student wrote, "I now know that just because someone says something doesn't mean it's true." This was immensely gratifying. After a year of hanging on by the skin of my teeth and feeling woefully inadquate at almost every moment, I was relieved. All my suffering had not been for naught. I was finally able to feel good, at least partly, about the work I had done.

But I didn't feel good about myself. Perhaps this sounds like splitting hairs; but in terms of how it affects my life, it really matters. This was one of the remarkably rare moments of my life where I did feel some satisfaction about work I'd done; but it was nothing more than that. It didn't change how I feel about myself. It didn't actually take away the shame. To this day, there is a very strong part of me that is deeply ashamed of everything that I did not manage to do for my students. My satisfaction at the end of the school year was lovely and important, but it didn't allow me to change the basic story about myself, the basic way I see myself.

Nothing I achieve, no accomplishment, will ever be sufficient to change my story about myself. I will always have flaws, and as my brain functions right now, I will always magnify those flaws so thoroughly that, no matter what my rational brain tells me about how great I am, I will feel bad about who I am.

So what does loving myself look like?

I think an important piece needs to be, accepting that I have flaws, letting go of them, forgiving myself for them. This is really, really, really, really hard to do. It is terrifying. Terrifying.

I have this deep fear that if I let up on myself, I will cease to function. In the words of my therapist, I have this idea that I constantly need "the whip at my back" in order to be able to make myself get anything done and hold my life together. I'm terrified that without my guilt holding me together, I will simply fall apart.

If I say to myself, and actually mean, and actually believe, "It's okay, Kate, that you made that mistake," then how will I stop myself from making that mistake again?

Ironically, I'm a good enough observer of myself that I've learned that it's actually easier to make myself get things done when I'm feeling good.

So doesn't it stand to reason that if I stopped beating myself up and actually accepted and stopped feeling guilty about my flaws, that I would become *more* functional, rather than less?

I'm so scared to lose my framework. But perhaps I can remind myself that there are actually reasons to do things other than duty and guilt. You clean your house because you want to live in a nice space; you study because you enjoy learning and want to get a degree; you treat people well because you believe in compassion; you eat healthy because you want to feel good and be healthy. Even activities without intrinsic value...you pay your bills because you know it will make you happier in the long run. All these activities don't have to be lined up on a good/bad scale; they can be thought of in terms of the actual value they bring to your life.

So what is it that I'm afraid of? Am I afraid that I value my own well-being so little that without the whip of guilt at my back, I won't actually take care of myself? I must be. Because I imagine what it would be like if I just let it all down, right this moment, said, ok Kate, you're really ok, you don't have to feel bad anymore....and immediately I'm scared, thinking, but what would happen next, do I actually go on living my life?

I guess that's what courage is, stepping into the unknown.

Another piece of loving myself, I think, would be allowing myself to feel satisfaction much more often for my accomplishments, and, perhaps more fundamentally, turning my knowledge that I am a good person into permission to actually feel good about who I am. I think perhaps these may come easier as I learn to forgive myself for my flaws and thus stop focusing so intently on how I don't deserve to feel good/how it's "dangerous" to feel good. To feel good about myself...what a delight that would be.