Why does self-love gotta hurt so much?

An inconclusive look at self-love, Oppenheimer, Killing Eve, choices, consequences and chain reactions.

We all make choices and sometimes regret seeps in. Maybe while we are in the shower, maybe while we are doing the dishes, maybe while we are driving, in those dull idle moments when our thoughts wander…maybe then. 

I have been trying to think about when I began to be consciously aware of self-love, and self-worth. Maybe I am only now beginning. We don’t typically associate pain with self-love and self-worth, but it’s more painful to stick up for myself than to give myself away. But that’s the trick, right? The deceit. In the long run, it is more painful to annihilate my own needs and desires for others. But in the moment, hurting others (by expressing how I feel), or what I perceive to be hurting others, cuts deeper. I come from a long line of people refusing to see the truth in things, in people refusing to take accountability. There is a case in Ohio that I recently heard about. A young woman named Sydney failed out of college and had been avoiding telling her parents, so she didn’t and went as far as pretending she still went to the school until the dean or somebody from the school called the mom while Sydney was with the mom. The dean was about to tell the mom her daughter was no longer enrolled in college when Sydney lost it and hit her mom with a cast iron skillet over the head a few times and then stabbed her 23 times, killing her. The dean on the other end of the phone heard the thuds of the pan hitting the mother and called the police. I was shocked at the story. I was shocked at what panic, and fear could lead to. I am always fascinated with stories like these because they are constant reminders of how primal humans are. We pretend we are a sophisticated species but history has shown us how easily we kill, and history continues to play out these consequences. I am shocked, but why? Didn’t the Greeks and Romans teach us that beheading was an honorable death? There was another case years ago that took my interest and I was talking about it to this extremely catholic girl I knew from high school. I was fixated on it and wanted to dissect it, I kept asking how could this happen, how could someone do that? To shut me up she said, “We will never understand because we aren’t like that.” I was in the middle of a sentence when she cut me off and I just shut my mouth and changed the subject. It was obvious she no longer wanted to talk about it. But what I wanted to say is that we are like that. We are human, and every human is capable of heinous acts. Which is where choice circles back around. Everything is a choice, everything is a consequence of a choice. 

Recently things have come to light that have made me start to unravel where my toxic guilt comes from. I started to notice anytime I expressed my emotions and someone was hurt by it I immediately began to feel guilty, to the point where I wanted to swallow all of my hurt for the sake of others, to protect the ones that were hurting me. Hurting others was something I could not bear, but hurting myself was easy. The words self-erasure came to mind. Maybe it was the eclipse season or maybe it was age, or maybe it was just timing but I realized that this was not a normal feeling. I looked up what it means to feel debilitating guilt and that’s where I found the term toxic guilt. The article I read detailed that people who struggle with this were likely people who were made to feel responsible for others’ emotions when they were children. The article says as children, we were forced to take on “fake responsibility”, which is a funny way to put it because it didn’t feel fake. It felt life-threatening. I was made to feel responsible for other people’s emotions. And so for 31 years I have been wiping my own tears alone in my room and making sure everyone else feels okay, taking others’ responsibility and putting it on my own back. When talking about this with a friend, her face looked shocked. “Jesus, you’re just being lacerated on the back,” she said. My habit kicked in and I was about to defend their actions when I realized this was part of the problem. This dysfunction was so deeply ingrained in me, that it was hard for me to even see objectively. Even as I sit here and write this, I feel this need to defend them, to say “but” to make excuses, to do anything to not taint their image, to do anything to not hurt them, but what I am beginning to see is that by doing that I am hurting myself. 

So why does self-love hurt so much?

I did not anticipate there to be so much pain. I didn’t think it would be easy but I didn’t think it would hurt me to stand up for myself. I didn’t think valuing yourself meant that the boundaries you place to honor yourself would feel like a knife in your gut. Is that because I value my family more than myself? Is that because I value others more than myself? Did I attribute worth and love to how much you can sacrifice for someone, how much of their pain you can bear? But if I continue to silence myself, my emotions, my wants and needs, and my feelings, what will become of me? Will I vanish into thin air or will I erupt?

I saw Oppenheimer last night, I appreciated Nolan’s storytelling and dedication to showcasing the complexities of a human. They were denying Oppenheimer clearance because after making the atomic bomb that went on to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he expressed that he was not sure it was a great thing. The FBI convoluted his words and made him appear like he was going back and forth on his opinion, and maybe he was, but isn’t that the most human thing to do? He admitted the atomic bomb was successful, but that didn’t mean he supported it. They thought this sentiment was absurd, how can you find something successful but not support it? They kept asking when he got his moral convictions, but the first scene of the movie shows us that Oppenheimer has always suffered conflicting morals. He was angry at the teacher humiliating him so he poisoned the apple, but then in the morning, he ran to retrieve the apple so as not to poison the professor. Reactions have consequences. With the atomic bomb, as a scientist it was his duty to discover the unknown, but what happens when the unknown could destroy the world? He was fixated on theory and chemicals and fusions and black stars. He was fixated on what there was to discover about quantum theory. So he made a choice in a split second. I do not know if he ever regretted his choice, because the nuances are deeper and greater than black and white thinking.

When I dropped off my brother and his now-wife at the airport earlier this month to elope in NYC, I was sad. I chose to not attend. I had decided to be financially responsible for once, but I was left feeling like I had made a mistake. I kept thinking about choices and how that’s all any of us have. I squeezed my eyes shut and thought if I could try to go back in time hard enough it would happen, the pain of regret was something I did not want to deal with, and yet here I was. All month it has become apparent to me all the choices I have made have lasting consequences. Chain reaction. And all the choices I don’t make also have lasting consequences. To avoid myself, and my feelings I wanted to desperately get away, run away to some other city, state, country, somewhere to hide. I was watching Killing Eve around this time. The therapist said to Eve one day when she asked if people can change, “I think reinvention is a form of avoidance.”

I have gone so long reacting on impulse, a reminder that I was still a child with childish feelings. A TikTok video tells me to put a photo of myself as my screensaver on my phone, of a time when things were rough, and to say “I deserve love.” every time I look at it. I log onto the app, the pattern, and see I am in some transitional, groundbreaking period. It is titled “Deep Conversations” and the tail end of the text says, “Intention: There’s an energy helping you cut through superficialities or anything that doesn’t aid your growth and expansion. You may notice that your mind is sharper than usual. The intention is to help you piece together patterns that you may not have noticed in the past.” Maybe everything is already written in the stars.

Tethered edges, and broken vases, I am constantly struggling between what is wrong and right, struggling with humanizing everything. Things tear in life, in relationships. Nothing stays the same forever, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Sometimes it’s the best thing.

A quote comes to mind. Caroline said it in Killing Eve but she was reciting T.S. Eliot’s words, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” 

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Hayden’s friend from college, Josh, was in town the other weekend because he was on tour with Peter Gabriel. After Hayden and Josh talked music for a while Hayden had to go to his golf course, so I said I would take Josh to the Menil. We talked about core values and how they shape us as people, and the decisions we end up making. Everything is filtered through our core values we decided. I asked him if he got inspired by art for his music. I asked him this because I know Hayden does and I wanted to know if it was true of other musicians. I asked him this because I know other writers do too. I wanted to find a painting that spoke to me so much that I wrote a whole book about it, like so many writers I love. I looked at everything and turned my head sideways but I was not able to submerse myself in it. Not with the guards following every step we took. Josh said he felt like music was the only art form that allowed someone to “spit up sounds and it be beautiful noise.” He said every other art was contrived, calculated. I nodded and said I could see where he was coming from. But really, I couldn’t. If I just shit out something on the drums or guitar it sounds like nothing, trust me I’ve tried. The only time that is possible is if you have a knowledge of the instrument, the same is true for writing, if you have a lexicon of words and a basic understanding of how it works you might be able to shit something out and call it art. But I could talk in circles about this because shitting something out doesn’t mean good art, but in the same vein what does constitute good art? Isn’t it in the eye of the beholder? We came across some modern conceptual pieces and I said I didn’t like these types because I wanted some frame of reference, some context. He nodded and said he disagreed. He liked them because they lacked context, and instead, he was allowed to fill his mind with anything he wanted. 

Seeing Josh who I met when I was 20 years old, made me think about who I was then and who I am now. I was deeply insecure then, and bitter, which had me thinking of self-love again. I didn’t have any self-love back then, not really, maybe I had false self-love. I equated value with boys’ attention, and being pretty. Leftover beliefs from a high school that didn’t really honor anything else. After I realized that was not self-love, I tried finding self-love in achievements, racing to photograph every model and musician I could, but that didn’t fill the void, so then I tried finding self-love in friendships and social media, but that soon proved fruitless. I tried reading about self-love, but that didn’t really help all that much. A friend posted a revelation she had about self-love on social media, and I responded by saying they should teach self-love in school. But how do you teach self-love? Maybe by sitting with the hard emotions, the mistakes you’ve made, the missteps. Maybe it’s knowing you have deeply hurt people in your life and you have to face it instead of running from it, maybe it’s by admitting shame, sadness, or regret. Maybe it’s about admitting you were wrong.

There is a part in Oppenheimer that stuck out to me. Oppenheimer goes to Einstein to ask him for his advice. Oppenheimer says, “When we detonate an atomic device, we might start a chain reaction that destroys the world.” Einstein says, “So here we are, hmm? Lost in your quantum world of probabilities, and needing certainty.” Einstein did not believe in inherent randomness, or that some things were indeterminate, meaning he did not believe in the theory of endless probabilities that even a God could not predict what would happen. Oppenheimer was obsessed with quantum theory, with the endless probabilities of something. Chain reactions. But here he was, at a crossroads with his belief, which is possibly what the whole movie is about. Choices. Belief. Cause and effect. I don’t know what any of this has to do with self-love. But to me, it connects. There’s a chain reaction to self-love, a cause and effect, and there are choices we have to make in order to allow ourselves to love ourselves. Sometimes it means blocking people who do not truly care about you, sometimes it’s setting firm boundaries with people who claim they love you, or even people who do actually love you. Oftentimes, it’s about forgiving yourself for not always knowing the right decisions to make, forgiving yourself for being human, and allowing yourself to express and feel the spectrum of your feelings. 

I’ve been thinking about nostalgia lately because I just submitted an essay for a litmag with that theme. Somehow the present always sends me to the past. I suppose I think there are some hidden answers in the past. And I don’t know if there are or if I’m seeing things that are not there but I think with hindsight we can see trickles of patterns and things leading up to this moment. I guess I am always trying to figure out who I was back then. Some people have clear visions of who they are but it’s so hard to see yourself clearly, the past provides distance and allows me to see myself more objectively, and less critically, which is sometimes what I need to be able to love myself. Distance, and time. Is that how it will always be? Or will there come a time when I am able to love myself in the moment? 

The hard thing about learning to love yourself is that it forces you to look at yourself. It forces you to look at the pain, at the hurt, at the thing you instinctively avert your eyes from. It is our nature as humans to avoid pain. I see it everywhere. It hurts to know I cannot do much to help those in pain, it hurts to see the pain at all. It is easier to look away, it is easier to forget about it that way. We justify ourselves and make excuses for ourselves or for others. But to avert your eyes is to run away, to avoid. How can we help if we do not look? How can we help ourselves if we won’t even look in our own eyes?

Everything has its choice and everything has its consequences. And self-love is in that claim too. I’m 31 and barely figuring out how to properly love myself. I am learning how to forgive myself, I am learning how to allow myself to feel all my emotions. There are probably a million more choices, probabilities, and consequences I have yet to make, we cannot avoid them. I am still scared. But I have tried the other way, why not try this way now?