1.1 How I Learned to Love Myself
I always thought of writers as astronauts because they could somehow float
in their minds with no gravity and let their imagination bump heads on the
heavenly realms above. It seemed so beautiful that writers- and really any
creative- could let wonder captivate them, propel them to see something
more than the gloom and doom of the world. But unless they’re crazy
successful, we shrug our shoulders at artists like this. We mark them as being
silly, not reliable, and not grounded within the gravity of present day life.
Yet it’s so fascinating that artists can create out of a sense of beauty
that others can’t always see. It’s honestly what caused me to struggle as a
writer. I have this peculiar tendency at times to see the world as it is, but
when that happens, I find my art suffers, along with my hope.
All this to say: I’m a naturally cynical person. It’s something I’m still
learning to combat.
It’s odd how we choose to dwell on the negative aspects of life rather
than celebrate the many wondrous blessings there are. I believe it’s somehow
easier to see the negativity because life can seem empty after a number of
failed attempts. We can be impatient people, wrestling with a certain
longing, yet see it denied several times, forcing us to see life as nothing more
than a parade of getting up and falling back down again. It’s easy to see life
through a negative lens.
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And at one point in my life, I was highly cynical about love and
relationships.
For a brief time during college, I gave up pursuing relationships. In
my heart, I desired it, just like any normal person does. But after a string of
failed attempts at relationships, I grew callous in my heart. It didn’t beat with
hope or optimism. It just sank low with bitterness. And since the brain and
heart are often in cahoots with each other, my brain concocted lies and
cheap rationalizations to justify my bruised heart.
When you choose to live within your pessimism, there are a couple
roads you could take: you can either wallow in your self-pity, rationalize the
situation to make yourself feel better, draw others into your mess so they can
give you the attention you desire, or change and work to be an inspiration
for others. I took the middle road between drowning in self-pity and being
overly logical. The problem with these two options is that I had concealed
my feelings from the rest of the world. I had this grand idea that I could
solve my desire and cynicism by myself, if only I spent more time writing and
diving into my thoughts.
__________
At the Student Union area of my college, I would carry my computer
over to a corner table by a window that I loved. Being at this corner table
made me feel like I had charge over who came and talked to me. The
Student Union area was always bustling with people, but the corner table
was far enough from the main traffic that I could remain by myself if I
wanted to. Also, at the corner table, no one could sneak up on me. I could
see everyone who was in the room and everyone who was coming my way.
Nothing surprised me.
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I mention this corner table because it’s where I spent much of my time
writing and thinking about relationships. In the Student Union area, there
would be couples cuddling with each other on the couches, holding hands,
and throwing back their heads to laugh at what possibly seemed to be some
of the worst jokes ever. They were happy they weren’t alone. And I was in
the corner, leaning over the table, studying them and wondering if I could
ever be that happy.
I would be lying to you if I didn’t say I often daydreamed of girls
coming to my corner table, sitting with me, and exclaiming their love for me.
That would have made the search so much easier. But no one did that, and
part of me wondered why.
My mind was spiraling down to the bedrock of self-loathing, a pit as
large as the Grand Canyon. I could feel my back slamming against the rocky
ground, paralyzing me from ever moving again. I felt stuck, like I couldn’t
get back to a more positive view on relationships.
But as a saving grace, my logic entered in and told me some things
that gave me a little hope:
You should use this time to work.
The fates say you aren’t ready for a relationship yet.
You’re suppose to do something great before a relationship takes up your time.
There it was: my mind rationalizing that I wasn’t in a relationship
because I had work to do.
I read of writers who produced one compelling work after the other,
and this life always appealed to me. I imagined that if I really put my mind
to it, I could publish a new book every two months (impossible I know, but I
was naïve then). I could pack up my bags, travel up to an unknown cabin
somewhere, and shut myself in, not leaving until I wrote my next book. I
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figured that the artists who lived this sort of life had no partner by their side.
So this is the life I dreamed about: a life where I could live as a hermit in the
middle of nowhere, listening only to my own inner dialogue chant away
possible new books.
I falsely believed that the life of a leader, someone who works to
change culture, is an intentionally solitary path. In order to do your best
work, you must be alone.
But this was simply a justification my logic gave to make me feel better
about myself. What I found instead is that the life of a leader can be
unintentionally lonely.
__________
And so I sat at the corner table, dreaming up scenarios of women
talking to me. But then I would shut down those thoughts the next minute so
I could put pen to paper. Not many people bothered me, and I didn’t tell
others how I felt. I just continued writing, hunched over the table like I was
inspecting tiny particles on the tabletop.
The solitary life was a lonely one, but it was the life I had chosen, or at
least, what the shoddy logic of my mind chose to believe. It made me feel
better about myself rather than being a hopelessly sad person wearing my
emotions on my sleeve. It was better to not tell anyone, to shut myself in, and
busy my upset mind with work.
Yet the problem was, I was only busying myself with work because I
was avoiding what lied underneath the surface. Beneath my fortified exterior
was this deep haunting feeling nipping away at my core.
I thought, maybe I wasn’t with someone because I wasn’t good
enough.
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Looking back, I can’t believe I actually thought this. It’s not a rare
idea to have in our society. It spreads among us like the Black Plague of love
and relationships. Many of us struggle with this idea that love is for lovely
people, and if we’re not lovely, then we were never designed to love
somebody.
But this is hogwash- a lie born from the depths of Hell, where Satan
concocts everything evil in the cosmos.
The mere fact that we are alive, have beating hearts inside our chest,
and emotions swirling around in our minds means that we were designed to
be vulnerable with others. It’s in our very nature to love, imbedded in the
way procreate, interact, and yearn for community. We were designed to
love, and our inability at snagging a relationship for ourselves doesn’t change
that fact.
But the trick is discerning whether this means to love someone in a
relationship or love our friends and family, because if we’re honest with
ourselves, we know not everyone is meant to be in a relationship. A
relationship is not an obligation set forth by the universe. We desire it
because it’s beautiful, not because it’s necessary.
Yet love, in the form of brotherly affection and community, is
something we really need to saturate our existence. There is a large
difference between the love of a friend and the love of a spouse, and while
both are great, only one is obligated for our human flourishing. Deep
friendship, strong enough to cut through our bones and rest in our hearts, is
a requirement for this human life we live.
I say all this because maybe many of us are single because we haven’t
yet learned what it looks like to love ourselves. And maybe, we can’t love
ourselves because we have trouble recognizing the love already present in
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our lives. We can’t see that we are in loving relationships with our friends
and family. And because we can’t receive that friendship love for ourselves,
we can’t truly love who we are because we see ourselves as empty of love.
Love for ourselves begins with the love we experience around us. And
when I say the love we experience, I don’t mean in the terms of a dating
relationship. I mean love in general. I mean the intimacy shared between
family. I mean the devotion given to friends. I mean the love we experience
daily, but never fully realize we do.
It’s this kind of love we need to survive, and it’s this kind of love we
need so that we may appreciate who we are.
__________
One day, I was writing at my usual corner table, accidentally smearing
my pencils marks as I worked across the page, when a friend came by with a
sandwich wrapped in her hands. Her eyes were genuine and sincere, and she
said, “Could I join you?”
This happens often when you choose to do your work in a public
place, but I figured that when you refuse to make eye contact with anyone
else, and look as if you don’t realize the world moving in a rush around you,
people typically tend to leave you alone. My friend, however, thought
otherwise. She saw me by myself, scribbling away thoughts on page, and she
figured I could use some company.
When she asked to join me, the look in her eyes was so warm and
jovial that I loosened the grip on my pencil, and said, “Of course you can.”
I scrambled to organize my sheets scattered across the tabletop as she
unwrapped her sandwich. For the next half hour, we talked, caught up on
life, and laughed over the silliest events that occurred in the past few days. It
was a refreshing experience, like taking a breath after emerging from deep
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waters. For a moment, I could feel the machinery in my mind begin to slow
down, as if it were taking the time to fill up on oil. And then, I was focused
entirely on living in that brief pause of invigorating friendship.
It was then that I realized something: love is not something you can
accomplish alone. It is not solitary.
This might seem like an obvious truth, but it really isn’t. Yes, you do
need two people in order for a love between people to operate, but there is
also the neglected aspect of loving yourself. And while it might seem like you
can love yourself by your own devices, this isn’t possible.
Truth is, you can’t fully learn to love yourself without the help of
others. You need people to communicate the mysteries raging on inside you,
the mysteries you’ve tried to solve for so long but couldn’t.
It’s not possible to ever achieve love alone. Every type of love,
including the love you give yourself, requires the nourishment of community.
And after sitting at that corner table with my dear friend, I felt
nourished in some mysterious way. She brought me out of myself, out of the
pit of busyness and sadness corrupting my ability to enjoy life. For a short
moment of time, I could feel my hard heart lighten and dance in a wonder
my brain didn’t fully comprehend.
As we sat there, laughing at life’s sense of humor, I rejoiced in my
inner most being that finally I had known what it was like to appreciate
myself. I finally felt at peace with my warring self-esteem, acknowledging
that love for another was possible for me; it’s just taking its sweet time to
flourish.
1.2 Why I Chose to Not Be Pressured into Love
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Around this same time, I was sitting on a staircase with one of my friends,
when he said something that struck me as odd.
“You ever feel like you have to have a girlfriend?” he asked, his voice
hushed so it wouldn’t echo in the stairwell.
“I always feel that way, but I know I shouldn’t.”
“Well, I know we shouldn’t,” he began. “But, if you think about it, it
makes sense. Look at it this way: we missed our chance at having childhood
sweethearts, so we cross that off the list. We also missed our chance at high
school sweethearts, cause I don’t know about you but I was stupid in high
school. And now, we’re in college! This is our last chance at finding a girl.
We’re never going to be with these many people ever in our lifetime. Once
we enter the real world, it’s going to get much harder to find someone to
date. We’ll have to find someone in our field. And what if we’re in a male-
dominated field?”
“Well then, life becomes hard,” I said.
We both slouched on that staircase, our chins resting on our hands,
dreaming of all the possible ways we could find a girlfriend in the remaining
time we had left in college. If I’m being honest, I felt pressure in that
moment. It was as if my friend’s anxiety over the situation contaminated my
thinking also. I started to believe I had to find a girl soon, or risk a life of
loneliness.
I’m convinced that this was one of the many factors feeding into my
cynical perspective on love. To believe that it was necessary to find love
before a certain amount of time made me doubt love more than believe in it.
It goes like this: you know those times when you set a billion alarms on
your phone to remind you of an important task, and you think you would
never forget that task, until you lose your phone, get wrapped up in
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something else, and completely forget the task? Those times frustrate me, but
they taught me a valuable lesson. Sometimes, it doesn’t help when we pay
more attention to something. It just makes us more frustrated when we don’t
accomplish the task we are paying more attention to.
It’s the same thing with love. When we obsess over finding the right
person before a self-perceived deadline we have floating in our minds, it
becomes more difficult, more disheartening when we don’t find that person
fast enough. We think the search for love should be easy and manageable,
but when we find that it isn’t, we get angry, hopeless, and doubtful about
love ever working in our favor.
Deadlines on love don’t help us in our search for it. They only make
us angry.
When I left down the staircase, my mind still whirring from the
conversation I just had with my friend, I realized I was getting more doubtful
on love the more I felt pressured to find it. By the time I reached the end of
the staircase, I made a claim that I wasn’t going to feel pressured into
anything. It was only ruining me.
We are people of freedom. We like to stretch out our arms and move
around in an open and free space. We don’t like being constricted.
Sometimes being constricted helps us work harder towards the things we
need to accomplish, because the more pressure you place on something, the
more it longs for freedom. But deadlines for task that aren’t completely in
our control don’t work, because then, freedom seems impossible. And the
less possible freedom becomes, the more bitter we become. This is how both
life and love work.
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Love is more precious, more beautiful, and more appreciated when it
coincides with freedom. In other words, love is more powerful when it’s a
choice, not an obligation.
I had a friend once tell me that culture exalts marriage and
relationships to appear as if it’s an obligation, like it’s part of some checklist
to life. You grow up, get an education, fall in love, get married, work, and
then wait to die. This is how the American Dream operates. So when my
friend told me this, I agreed with him. The greater culture does press love on
us, and as a result, one can get cynical about relationships because they don’t
feel as if they are choosing. They’re simply just following after societal
norms.
But much of this is self-perceived. These pressures only press on us
because we allow them to. If love is better as a choice, then start first by
choosing not to be pressured into it.
__________
A couple days after that conversation, I was perfectly fine being single.
In fact, I had come to terms with it. Sure, I wanted someone by my side, but
I didn’t want that desire to corrupt my ability to live in the present. So I
continued sitting at my table in the corner of the Student Union, simply
writing and commenting on love rather than engaging in it.
Yet, an odd thing happened once I chose to not be affected by the
pressure of love. Once I stopped looking for it and stopped being burdened
by it, it came.
Love has that stealthy quality to it. It likes to blindside us. It likes to
come when we least expect it because only then does it have the ability to
sweep us into something wonderful.
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