Why Self-Love Is So Hard To Achieve
And why it might just be a problem of language
Like so many of us, I’ve chased the ever-elusive concept of “self-love” for decades now. Yet it is only in the past three years that I can say I have genuinely experienced loving myself. (Honestly, I thought it would involve a lot more bath-bombs and “you are enough” post-it notes stuck to my mirror.) Through this time of self-loving, I have discovered that the phrase self-love is not only an inadequate way to describe the experience, but it may be a roadblock in the way of truly knowing what self-love is.
When I am feeling what we call self-love, I feel the self fall away, and the love is not aimed at an Andrea-shaped target, but instead it is pointing everywhere, in every direction, at the whole of us, the collective, of which I am a part. In fact, only when I am experiencing this love does my sense of being separate from others reveal itself to be an illusion.
The feeling (and feeling also feels like an inadequate word here) is the truest homecoming I have ever known. It’s a boundless sense of being wholly welcomed into the arms of the universe, while simultaneously recognizing the universe’s open arms as my own. I am not always in this state, but when I am I know it by the fact that I am no longer capable of living on Andrea Island with thoughts of Me Me Me charting the course of my days. Me is joyfully replaced with We.
The We I speak of here stretches beyond humanity to the tadpoles in the creek, to the rowdy rainstorm that flooded my basement, to the mourning dove perched on the Honey Maple tree watching me learn Qigong (awkwardly), to the ladybug who I suspect is a boyish ladybug like me, walking the tightrope of my lifelines while I carry her outside to sunbathe atop a kind and sturdy rock.
“Some of my best friends are rocks,” says my friend Ethel. What is your definition of alive? Mine is experiencing this love, and staying true to my commitment to finding my way back to it whenever I have lost my way. And to be clear– this love never depends on what I have or haven’t accomplished, doesn’t even care that I’m a poet who wants to make beauty, because I am, we are, without any doing, beauty. This love applauds my beingness, loves me simply because I was born, and will love me, love us, after we depart from these temporary bodies.
Does loving ourselves simply for being, without requiring ourselves to change to be deserving of love, mean we should stop growing? Of course not. It means growing for a different reason, growing for the same reason the Honey Maple grows—because it loves to grow, because growing is how it loves.
The first time I experienced this love I was shook by a realization—I had never not loved myself. I only thought I hadn’t. By that I mean, this love is always ringing through the essence of every being. It is the same love the squirrel experiences, the aspens, the bioluminescence in the sea. Not loving ourselves, I’ve come to know, is a very human concept. We don’t have to strive or achieve something to love ourselves, we only have to strip the thought that we should not love ourselves away, to see that we have been loving ourselves all along.
Want to know some more good news? This kind of love will love us even though it knows we have not always been good. This kind of love knows that even a big heart can get lost in the canyon of an old wound. This love weeps compassion through every mistake I have ever made, cradles me in the word human, and cherishes my spirit because I am not exceptional.
The word because is vital in that sentiment. Why were we taught that to be worthy of our own love we have to be exceptional? Being exceptional means to be better than others. If my lovability depends on being better than others, then my lovability depends on others being less-than, and is therefore not love.
When I am feeling this love, it thrills me to see that I am nothing special. Nothing special is such a massive relief! It frees me from the deadening demands of comparison. It erases the possibility that I could ever un-win my own love. And it roots me in the most transformative learning of my life—when I am truly loving myself, I am, in fact, loving everything. All of us, at once.
Thank you so much for reading, friends. I’d be thrilled if you’d share some of your own experiences with self-love in the comments.
Love, Andrea 🖤
P.S thank you to those of you who have asked for image descriptions on the photos included in my newsletters. Currently Substack does not offer this accessibility option for gallery photos, so I’ll be including them here.
Above gallery photos: text quotes read—
Our negative thoughts are like cruddy social media comments, and what if I simply discontinued reading my negative thoughts, too?!
Remember you will never know who you are in your spirit by attempting to be above your humanness. It is always through your humanness that you truly know your spirit.
So I keep asking —what about this culture helps me know who I truly am? And what about this culture (including the parts I have always consider to be "good") are a wall in the way of me knowing who I truly am?
When we stop chronically trying to prepare ourselves for future pain we become far more equipped to handle that pain when (and if) it comes.
“Nothing special is such a massive relief!” I remember the first time I felt this. I was on a mountain, in a forest ecology class, learning about glacial time. I thought about glaciers flowing and realized how tiny my lifespan was in relation to that. It was such a relief!
The experience of the feeling of self falling away into oneness is one of several reasons I’ve added “we” to my pronouns (my phone dictation interpreted that as “one mess”, which is often also true!). Other reasons include the fact that after a bone marrow transplant for acute leukemia “my“ bone marrow is from a generous stranger in Germany, and I have at times delighted in the feeling of the trillions of cells in my body as tiny beings who all cooperate to create “me“. In Buddhist terms this is called interdependence, and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh called it interbeing. It’s interesting to hold this knowing in the context of day-to-day life where I have to identify as “I“ to exist in our hyper individualistic culture. It’s like living on more than one level of existence at the same time. And I certainly spend plenty of time on Adrienne Island, seeking comfort and avoiding discomfort like everyone else! My aspiration is to shift the balance toward “we” as much as possible.
"even a big heart can get lost in the canyon of an old wound."
My current relationship with self love is lost in the canyon of an old wound. I love this image. I am this image.
I know somewhere in my past I have met with self love as you have described it here, but I cannot see it from where I am at just now. So I Be Here, trusting that Self Love will shine my way through.
Thank you for this. 🙏🏻