Love Self First

Love Self First: Self-Care to Self-Love

I grew up in what I considered a loving family; love that was shown in many ways and different forms. Family love ran deep-grandmama wisdom love; daddy hero love; hold-it-down mommy love; always-there-for-you auntie and uncle love; and finally, fun, sibling, cousin, and pumpkin-vine family love. That love would grow into the foundation that guided the love I would have for my own family later in life. It was also the love that made me feel secure, safe, and protected, perhaps even overly protected, in my own little world. But that only went so far from shielding me from the ugliness of the outside world that would “try” to diminish me as a black, marginally-educated, artistically-talented, athletically-fortified female from modest economic means.

One could say cultural proliferations, pivotal moments, turbulent times, technological advancements, rhetorical ramblings, and political polarization define every generation. Taken as a whole all, whether or not I was consciously aware of them, inform my view of the world and eventually contribute to my redefined perspectives on love. One that had to include self-love or more aptly, loving self first. With the deference of a higher love, I willingly embraced my journey of love and self-love, regardless of what was going on in my personal life or the world around me.

            I’m not referring to variations of romantic love like infatuation, puppy love, superficial love, or lust. I’m referring to a definition of love of self and others across an entire love spectrum that includes qualities like respect, trust, belief, integrity, deference, peace of mind, honor, appreciation, and gratitude (not that you can’t have these qualities in romantic love). With a matrix of life experiences at hand and years of living under belt, I couldn’t help but question the misaligned meanings of love that I had encountered along the way and examine its applications in my life. That undoubtedly created more questions than answers; and more than can be answered in the scope of this conversation. Even questions that seemed simple on the surface demanded more inquiry than I could give here.

However, here are some questions from my ongoing journey: Does love really conquer all? I learned, for better or worse, you go the distance. Is love as forgiving as it is giving? Does love protect? How can one tell when love manifests itself in the absence of words? Is it an energy that ebbs and flows? Or is love an overused term hackneyed by modern marketing ploys? Does love come with conditions, expectations, and caveats? Love is certainly not something to pull out on special occasions or when it was convenient. So, is love overrated? What is the point of love anyway?

After all of these questions about love, how can I define self-love without first attempting to define love? Are you ready? There are as many definitions for love as there are people in the world. That’s it…that’s all I can come up with in short order from that which can potentially be defined by six billion people around the world; it’s an individually sacred definition. However, here is a small part of my take on an inexhaustible defining of what love is.

In the human realm, love means different things to different people. That is a rather complicated, universal truth. Other emotions masquerade as love, another universal truth. Misunderstood and misguided love can be toxic, enabling or crippling. Love is fickle…sometimes ending, sometimes lasting, sometimes dependent on quid pro quo, but forever changing and morphing. Our feelings, actions, and words are not necessarily an indication of our love for someone and vice versa; yet another universal truth.

In the human realm, love can also be that beautiful, powerful thing that truly bonds families and friends; that creates heroes; that spurs humanity to evolve and collectively embrace their figurative brothers and sisters; that creates another human life; that feels so good; and that ignites a freedom to expand the definition to whom love belongs and extend the feelings of it beyond tradition to others. Is love really not having to say you’re sorry or is that just a great movie line? Though it exists, there are no absolutes or assurances in the realm of human love. To me, what should be naturally unencumbering, love is…arguably a privilege not afforded to everyone.

So, depending on how much wisdom and understanding one desires to gain about love throughout their adult life, one will probably experience the gambit of it on the love spectrum-anywhere from near lovelessness to near unconditional love. The rest, I believe, is proportionally filled in with an opposite spectrum of fears like dependency, lust, control, dominance, materialism, addictions, greed, emotional abuse, or even anger. To some degree, most of us will spend our lifetimes attempting to get to higher points of love. There are the unfortunate ones who will find it difficult, even painful, to explore the depths of love. And still, others will be totally oblivious to the fact that significant and measurable love is absent from their lives. With an intentional absence of a conversation about agape love in this writing, I debatably assert, and have come to believe, that one cannot love anyone else fully until one wholly loves self first.

Growing up I never heard of this thing called self-love. The modern iteration of it had only come into the American societal lexicon in the 1950’s. Viewed somewhere between a basic human necessity to incubate love and the moral fault of selfishness, it’s the former that I’m focusing on here. Selfish self-love, an altogether different emotion with a much different set of outcomes, will not be explored here.

This is how I see self-love. It is an energy that begins with how we were loved from birth but also includes our history mixed in from the messaging of generations’ old circumstances that has nothing to do with our present-day life. Our being is filled with the energy of those who raised us and those who raised them, and so on, and so forth. One only hoped that the energy was consciously awake enough to be aware of its actions, perhaps so as to be giving and caring, but at least not to be destructive and neglectful. As we got older, the people and environments that nurtured or neglected that energy followed form like water that filled space. Ultimately, what resulted in our adult lives was a love, or lack thereof, that we showed towards others, was a reflection of how much we were shown by example to love ourselves.

Of course, there are other circumstances that make the matters of love more complicated than what I’m presenting here. I am not making judgements nor am I taking the moral high ground. I understand there are many layers to loving self and others that are not explored here, but think about this? If we really peeled back the layers, on some subconscious or unconscious level, how we treat others is how we treat ourselves and how we treat ourselves is how we treat others. Sit with that for a moment. If there is some level of dependency in our adult love relationships, there was something missing in our love of self early on. If there is a level of cruelty in our adult love relationships, there was a level of cruelty presented as an interpretation of human interaction early in life. These ponderings become a general guideline to check ourselves.

Periodically, I reexamine my own book of self-love. Sometimes, I am too generous and other times, not generous enough. My conclusion is, no matter what stage of life I’m in and who I interact with, or what I’m going through, I am striving to make sure I love self first: with the kind of love that understands acceptance of what is; that understands I can care for others from afar or close up; with the kind of love that doesn’t let others define who I am; love that is compassionate, generous, and free of judgements, love that is not stifled by past experiences, and with the kind of love that beams out to others, but, at the same time, protects my own boundaries. Love self first.

Stay tuned for Part 2, Practical applications of self-love.

To love, healing and happiness,

Dianne

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