You can’t be loved until you love yourself-lie

Hey Gorge,

How are you? How was your week?

“You can’t be loved until you love yourself. ”

This is something we see around the internet. Pre-internet I wonder if we would have really seen the quote around as much as we do today. I recently read a post on the insecure girls Instagram account and it made me think- why yes- it is problematic.

You see, I am not sure my journey to loving thy self will ever be complete. Imagine if I’d have waited until I loved myself fully to be loved by my current husband and now my children- my husband wouldn’t exist and my children wouldn’t exist.

There’s a difference between loving YOU and letting love in. If we close ourselves off to love because we are only working on ourselves right now then are we closing ourselves off to love and really that is what the quote is asking of us.

Feminists in general are all about the self- love, the 1960/70s fan culture that has appeared recently is again all about loving oneself. But in reality, we live in a place that is no where near what it was like in the 1960s. We are absorbing and digesting a vast amount of information laden with “have you tried this or that” you too can be pain free, trauma free, loving your wobbly bits and bobs if you just did this, that and three thousand other things. We sit on our phones reading and absorbing all the things we could be doing to better ourselves. Put our phone down and feel either even more distance from our goals for loving our selves or so overwhelmed we need a lie down.

I feel that loving ourselves doesn’t happen in our teens, nope not all. Find a teen who loves and accepts themselves in 2020- isn’t going to happen. It doesn’t happen in our 20s because we are still trying to work out who we even are and what the fuck we want to do with ourselves and then there’s the 30s. Well, where are you in your life in your 30s if you have been just focussing on loving you and you only and not letting any kind of love in?

I have learnt that it takes time. I am now in my 30s and only now that I am in a stable relationship with children do I feel like I can work on self-love. I was always looking for something before that. I spent my 20s working on several toxic relationships that left me feeling only hate towards my personality and basically just who I was. I felt like I was never good enough at anything I did and I did speak to myself in ways I wouldn’t speak to a friend- another quote flung around to make you feel like- shit me I am such a crap person because I do tell myself some of those things.

One thing I have learnt is that cyclical awareness has helped my self-love no end. I now accept that there are days when I feel less than myself because I am struggling with a certain hormone fluctuation and because I know it is coming because I have been cycle tracking and following my own cyclical pattern for a long while- I accept myself.

I get in front of the camera and force myself to be in photos with my children and husband so I have memories to hold on to and look back at and I look at these and the others and don’t focus solely on myself.

I still struggle to open myself up to love but I let people gradually into my life and decide if the addition of said person is a positive or a negative. If this person continues to make me feel certain feelings I no longer wish to hold, I either consider if this is because of my own issues or their issues.

Letting my husband love me and knowing he loves me is one of the biggest things I have ever done in my path to self-love. Finding a new love after an older love made me question me, was a big step but I opened my heart over time and he pulled his love inwards. The protection and the understanding that he loved me for, well, me was an eye-opening strengthening experience.

Since having a husband, I now have children and they love me unconditionally. They have shown me the depths love can go to and I have learnt that their love, for now, is unwavering and kind. If I am kind and showing love to myself and with them I build on my own self-love.

Being under the spotlight in a family and being the female elder of the group of course- I have also had to face things about myself I wouldn’t have had to have done previously. It’s a double-edged sword because though this is hard at times, it’s also helping to mould my life experience into something greater and more fulfilling as I am letting go of my negative feelings.

And this has all happened over the past 8 years, in fact I am no where near close to really deeply loving myself.

I need more time, to learn more from my husband and children and to learn more about self-love. I need to let go of more resentment and there is still trauma held in my body. It takes time, patience and understanding.

We can work on ourselves over the years and whether that is on our own or with someone is down to the choice of the universe. If we, however, tell ourselves to hold off on relationships because we don’t love who we are and we truly believe we can’t be loved because of this, well we could miss signs and build up more resentment for never really going after what we wanted because the goal of loving ourself is a constant on-going project as we change and move through life and new experiences.

Lots of Love

Naomi x