I Said I Loved You, But I Lied

I've said “I love you” thousands of times in my life, and most of the time I've meant it.

There was one person I may have been lying to.

Me.

Which is a little embarrassing, considering I've been telling myself I love myself for probably thirty years.

And I believed it.

I had good reason to. I've been doing personal-development work since my early twenties. I became a mother young, and I knew early on that I wanted my children to have a healthier childhood than I had. That mattered enough to me that I went looking for answers.

I read, studied, and paid attention to myself. I learned about parenting, relationships, and human behavior, and eventually my search took me deeper into spirituality. Along the way there was meditation, writing, the Enneagram, workshops, groups, more books than I can count, and plenty of uncomfortable conversations with myself.  And learning to love oneself is the foundation of loving others well.

I've changed because of it. A lot. So how could I possibly have missed this?

It turns out I did love myself.

There was just some fine print that I, of course, didn’t read.

I loved myself when I was being the woman I wanted to be: loving, thoughtful, responsible, self-aware. Someone who could be counted on. Someone who knew better.

Then I would do something that didn't fit that picture. I'd lose patience with someone I loved, forget something important, let fear stop me, or break a promise I'd made to myself. Occasionally I'd skip the gym for many, many, many days on end while continuing to pay the monthly fee with remarkable consistency.

Then came the day I ate an entire box of Fudgsicles.

That happened. And yes, I know how many are in a box.

Those were the moments when the way I talked to myself became interesting.

I'm actually pretty compassionate with other people when they screw up. I understand that people get overwhelmed, tired, frightened, distracted or irritated. We make choices we wish we hadn't made. I can usually give other people plenty of room for being human.

Then I'd do something I knew better than to do, and suddenly the rules changed.

You knew better. You should have handled that differently. You should have remembered. After all the work you've done, why are you doing this again?

That last one is particularly useful when you're trying to turn thirty years of growth into a weapon against yourself.

My instinct to blame myself began long before I knew what I was doing. I was three and a half when my father left our family. There was something I said at the dinner table before he left, and my little-girl brain connected the two events.

I said something; he left, therefore I caused it.

He never came back, and somewhere inside me, that became more than believing I'd done something wrong. It became believing there must be something wrong with me.

Of course, I didn't have those words at three and a half. I just carried the feeling.

And I got very good at taking the blame. Sometimes too good.

Years later, I was in a car accident. When the police officer arrived, I told him it was my fault.

It wasn't.

My first response to a collision was to save everyone the trouble of investigating.

I can laugh about that now, but the story says a great deal about how I moved through life for many years. If something went wrong, I looked at myself first.

Eventually, I could see where that came from. I worked through the story of my father leaving and came to know, at a much deeper level, that a three-year-old child had no power to break up a family. I started noticing how readily I claimed responsibility for things that weren't mine, and gradually that changed.

That's important to me because I haven't spent my whole life trapped in the same place. The young woman who started this work and the woman writing this today are very different women. I've grown up and I've become wiser. I've learned to own what belongs to me and, most of the time, leave alone what doesn't.

I've also gotten much better at apologizing, making amends and recovering when I get something wrong. At times the loving response is changing my behavior. At others, it's recognizing that I've already done what I can and putting down the damn stick I've been beating myself with.

That second part took longer.

Recently, I became frustrated with Harold and spoke to him in a tone I didn't like. The frustration was legitimate. The tone wasn't. I knew that almost immediately.

I apologized, owned the way I'd spoken to him and thought about what had happened and what I wanted to do differently next time.

If another woman told me that story, I'd know exactly what I would say to her. You're human. You made a mistake. You owned it and apologized. Learn from it and move on.

I certainly wouldn't suggest she continue punishing herself for three more days just to demonstrate how deeply sorry she was.

Yet for years, I could do exactly that to myself.

And I think that's the part of self-love I misunderstood.

I thought loving myself meant becoming more and more like the person I wanted to be. Part of it does. Growth matters to me. Accountability matters to me. I want to look honestly at myself and change what I can.

But loving myself only when I'm pleased with myself isn't quite love.

It's approval.

There's a difference.

Approval is easy when we're behaving ourselves. Love has to hold up under considerably more pressure. It has to survive the bad decision, the forgotten important day, the harsh tone, the fear that got the better of us, and the promise we made to ourselves on Tuesday and abandoned by Thursday.

And for me, it also has to survive Fudgsicles.

For much of my life, part of me believed that if I worked hard enough on myself, I'd eventually become the woman who got it right most of the time.

I've made a lot of progress. I also remain completely capable of getting it wrong.

Maybe that's where the real shift happened.

I don't want self-love to depend on how pleased I am with myself on any given day. I want to tell myself the truth, own my behavior, repair what needs repairing, and learn what there is to learn. Then I want to let myself move forward.

It sounds fairly obvious when I put it that way. It took me decades to actually live it.

I've known many of these things intellectually for years. Knowing them in my head and believing them deeply enough to change how I treat myself have turned out to be two very different things.

So maybe I didn't lie when I said I loved myself all those years.

I loved myself as deeply as I knew how. I just hadn't read all the fine print. I'm still reading it. And that's the point.

Love is ALL there is,

Diana

P.S. This is Part One of a two-part look at self-love. Next week, I'm going a little deeper into what I've learned about loving ourselves when we wander away from the person we want to be, and finding our way back again.

Loving ourselves is one thing. Figuring out how to actually do it is another.