I’ve spent the majority of my life living in subjection to a very intense fear of vulnerability. Paralyzed under the strength of it’s reign, I would let it affect every aspect of my life, often going to great lengths to avoid all forms of emotional intimacy. I kept others an arm’s length away at all times and built up ironclad walls around the core of myself. I was always on alert: if someone happened to threaten the security of one of those walls, I would immediately become defensive and push away.

But a propensity to self-inflict emotional alienation is not exactly healthy, and I think I knew it, even before beginning this journey. I was aware that I was subconsciously sabotaging every relationship in my life, but I didn’t understand myself well enough at the time to know why I was doing it or how I could stop repeating the behavior. The funny thing about those metaphorical walls is that they didn’t just keep others from accessing my emotions, they kept me from accessing them as well.

I couldn’t understand what I was feeling because I wasn’t allowing myself to go that deep within my own heart. Through this journey, I was able to slowly break down the walls and, in doing so, finally see why I had built them in the first place.

It turns out my fear of vulnerability stemmed from an even deeper fear: rejection. And that fear stemmed from the belief that rejection was all I deserved or would ever earn. So, in the name of self-preservation, I became determined to always be the one to leave first. I was truly convinced that if anyone did stay and got to know me too well, they’d eventually realize that I wasn’t good enough to love. That something was wrong with me. That I was broken.

Well, obviously something was broken, but it wasn’t me. It was the way I felt about me. It was a life-changing moment when I finally understood the magnitude of the difference between the two and realized the reason I thought no one could ever love me was because I didn’t love me.

I wasn’t unworthy and I wasn’t broken, I only felt unworthy and felt broken, which made me constantly doubt myself and my own existence. But that’s such a warped and unhealthy view of life!

We are all created with a great capacity to love and accept love in return. Our very existence is based on Love (I capitalize “Love” here for a reason: the english language only has one word to describe the many different forms of love, so I use a capital “L” to represent the all-consuming, all-forgiving, unconditional form of love that we were each designed to know, give and receive).

The questioning of our existence happens when that idea of Love gets thwarted, which it so often unfortunately does.

Maybe it’s been distorted due to a childhood where there was no true example of capital “L” Love. No example of a Love that is willing to sacrifice or humble itself for the sake of another. Maybe there was only an example of love that was prideful, maybe even spiteful, and contingent on reciprocation. Maybe there was a lack of attention, a lack of warmth, or even a history of abuse.

As a result of these flawed examples of love, we end up feeling broken and damaged. We start to believe that the reason we never received capital “L” Love is because we just weren’t worth it.

Then, as we grow older, we believe that if we weren’t good enough for Love back then, we’ll never be good enough for Love, ever. We start placing conditions on ourself and our worth, saying: “When I achieve this goal, maybe then i’ll finally be worthy of love. Then, I’ll be happy. Then, my life will mean something.”

But your life means something now.

You are worthy of love now. The very fact that you are breathing means you are being held up in love, even if you don’t yet feel its presence. You have the ability to become its presence, you just have to start believing in the power you have to change your own story. And you do hold the power here. 

You have the power to choose happiness and you have the power to give yourself what no one else did: forgiveness, attention, Love.

It starts with acknowledging everything you’ve felt and are currently feeling. If you were never validated as a child, you can start validating yourself now and giving yourself permission to feel your own emotions. If you were abused in the past, you can be the one to start treating yourself with the dignity and respect you’ve always deserved, instead of self-continuing the abuse.

You can be an example to yourself now of the Love you’ve always wanted, but never felt worthy of. You are not broken and you are not unworthy. You only feel unworthy.

By changing your mind, you can change yourself and become a living example of unconditional Love. Once you start to give yourself and others that Love, you will stop falling for the lies that call you undeserving.

Uppercase or lowercase love: We all have to decide which one we’re going to accept and which one we’re going to give. Once you choose capital “L” Love, your life will never be the same. You will never be the same. You won’t feel broken anymore, you’ll just feel Loved. 

​Loved. With a capital “L”.
​
DFTLY,
Ali

It wasn’t until I started being open and honest about my own journey that I realized just how misconstrued the term “self-love” is. At first, I was really thrown off by some of the reactions I encountered, to the point where I even started  to second guess myself and my decisions.

But eventually, I learned to stop taking offense. I came to the conclusion that any benighted response I faced was just a lack of understanding on the person’s part, and I have since done my best to educate, whenever necessary, on the true motivations behind a self-love journey.

To this day, I get a lot of comments like “What does that even mean?” and “I don’t really get what you’re trying to do here” and “Are you just tired of dating or something?” (Um, yeah, but that’s not the point).

My personal favorite though, and the one that I’m faced with most, is the one that I believe is the absolute culmination of all ignorant thoughts and attitudes towards the self-love movement: “Isn’t that the world’s problem, that people love themselves too much and others too little? It just seems really selfish to me.” 

Now, because I have personally grown a lot on this journey, it’s much easier today than it was in the beginning to control the intense eruption of emotions that I would feel at this accusation. The accusation that I am, and that anyone else who pursues self-love is, in fact selfish for taking the time to heal.

All of the things that I would want to say in reply to this notion, some less eloquent and less gracious than others, can be sum up simply by saying: False. So false.

This infuriating stigma stems from those who confuse, quite inaccurately, selfish love with self-love. And let me be clear, the two are completely, totally, indubitably different.

Selfish love comes from the need to take from others. It says “What I have isn’t enough, so I need to take from you in order to fill this need in me.” A lack of self-love is in actuality the very thing that births, breeds, and encourages selfish behaviors.

When you are completely content with yourself and fully appreciate who you are, you don’t feel a need to take from others because you no longer have a void to fill. Instead, you can say confidently and honestly “I am full. I am complete. I have no desire to take from you because I have all that I need. Instead, here, let me give.”

But, in order for anything to be given, there must first be a source from which to give. Love is no different.

In order to love (truly love in an unselfish and unconditional way), there needs to be a wealth of love on the inside that you have and feel constantly and can reach in at any time to share. The problem occurs when there is a lack of self-love and self-worth. You reach in but there’s nothing there. There is no source of love, so there is nothing to give.

That is why there is such an overwhelming amount of selfishness in the world. Instead of having a wealth of love in the depth of us, and being able to share that love, we have only an emptiness that we try desperately to fill.

We start reaching and searching for who and what we can take from in order to feel complete. Then, even after taking, we still don’t feel whole. The void is still there because the only thing that can fill it is a love that stems from the inside and then grows outward, not the shallow love that we try to take from the outside and shove inward to keep for ourselves.

So, is an individual on a self-love journey in fact selfish? Maybe. The answer depends on where they are at on their journey. The truth is, if they are just starting out on the journey, they probably are selfish. But that’s only because they haven’t yet learned to truly love themselves and therefore have no way of loving others.

That’s the point: the self-love journey derives from the recognition that in order to love anything or anyone, you must first learn to love yourself. 

That they are starting out on the journey at all means they acknowledge the fact that there’s something wrong with their current behaviors and they are trying to change. They see that they are not only hurting themselves but possibly and probably others, and they are trying to change. They recognize that selfishness comes from a deep need for love and they are on this journey to learn to develop that love.

They desire more for their lives: to be more, grow more, love more.

We should be encouraging their journey, not giving them one more reason to doubt themselves. Because honestly, if someone you know is starting out on their own journey, it means that soon they are going to be able to love so much better and so much truer.

And the world needs more people like that: people who have enough love on the inside that they can stop taking and start giving and spreading unconditional love to others.

So please, please let’s stop discouraging those who want to heal. Let’s stop discouraging those who actually want to stop being selfish and want to learn to give.

​Let’s stop discouraging love.
​
DFTLY,
Ali