love, love, love

a reflection on friendship, faith, and the long road toward loving myself

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about love.

What does it mean to love others?
To do it well?

November tends to pull these questions out of me. A month of early darkness, melancholy and a coldness that lingers in the bones.

My birthday month. A reminder of how alone I feel. How alone I am.

Sometimes I fear I’m incapable of love. I don’t know how to receive it. I stumble trying to express it.

I’m the product of immigrants who arrived here in struggle. Who carried memories of war and poverty. Their love ran deep, but it was wrapped in layers of pain and survival.

I was the teenager crying in her room on a Friday night, listening to Lady Gaga and yearning alongside her when she sang, “I just wanna be free, I just wanna be me, And I want lots of friends that invite me to their parties.”¹

One of my earliest understandings of love came from church. Love was supposed to be the center of everything. Love God, love others, love yourself. I never understood that kind of love. Even there, I was an outcast. A misfit in a place where the lost were supposed to be found.

As an adult, I bulldozed my way into belonging. I found a church where fitting in finally mattered to me. For a while, it worked. It wasn’t perfect, but it meant something.

I still remember that Easter Sunday when I realized it was over.

The curtain was torn, and behind it was just an ordinary man. The “Wizard” I’d hoped for didn’t exist. And the friends I’d made over those five years? I don’t speak to any of them now. They still gather together. And I’m alone again.

The truth is, I feel more unloved by friends than I ever have by the rejection of a man.

And I know I play a part in this. I utilize independence as self-sabotage, a skill learned early. When I feel someone pulling back, I leave.

But I’m genuinely happy alone. I enjoy my hobbies and my idiosyncrasies. I get overwhelmed when what I want conflicts with my need for others. So I choose solitude. I make peace with it.

But this has also forced me, in the last few years, to learn how to love myself.

Because younger me didn’t know how. I didn’t have a clear example of the kind of love that would have made me feel loved. And it’s hard to love ourselves when we’ve never felt that kind of safety from others. But no one is obligated to love us the way we want.

This is the hard truth I’ve learned in my thirties:

We have to learn to love ourselves, because no one else is required to.

And here’s the even harder truth — the one that softened everything:

I was never actually unloved.
I just didn’t receive the kind of love that made me understand I was loved.

We all carry an image of what love should look like.
But the love we’re given doesn’t always match that image.

Learning to accept that, and still choosing to love myself, has been the real work.

PS, the heading is a direct quote from the one and only Teresa Giudice. Ironic.

1