Learning to Love: Meeting Yourself

I haven’t written here for a long time. I’ve been meeting myself, in all sorts of ways. 

At the end of last year I had a very meaningful relationship end and I’ve been spending these months reconnecting with myself. Who am I now? What do I like to do? What don’t I like doing? How many assumptions about myself have I been living under, believing I could never change and that was just me? 

What are some of the things you’ve always told yourself you couldn’t do? 

Oh, I’m just not the kind of person who… 

Me? I could never…

Because learning to love ourselves, truly, madly, deeply, can only begin when we truly meet ourselves as we are in the present moment. Not who we were when we were small, not who society tells us we must be and not who we wish we could be, but who we are, right now.

Who are you in the silence? When the emails and Whatsapps have stopped for the night, when the podcasts and headphones are switched off, when the fear of how you’ll be perceived by others quiets for a minute.

What happens if you don’t respond a certain way just because that’s how you’ve always responded? What if you do something that has always scared you and prove to yourself you’ll be okay on the other side? 

What if you trust that the adult version of you, who has survived every hard thing, heartbreak, headache and mistake that you’ve ever been through, has got your back. That you’ll always come out the other side and laugh again. 

So much of our pain and suffering, both individual and collective, comes from the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. What if they just aren’t true? What if we saw, with clear eyes, who we are and what we’re capable of? 

There are a few things that have happened this year that show me that my thirty two year old self is not necessarily the self that I thought she’d be. 

She’s developed a drag king persona (Chase Cash, the AI Tech bro) for one. She’s also cut off all her hair, despite believing for decades that long curls were a defining characteristic and something she could never be without.  

She’s single, renting, and earning significantly less money than she was at 29. She doesn’t mind though as she’s got the wealth of freedom and time and she wouldn’t trade it back. She’s got a lot of love in her life, even if it’s not romantic.  

She’s addressing her people-pleasing tendencies and trying to learn what healthy conflict looks like, the kind that comes from a desire to deepen connection and that is followed by repair. 

She finally believes that she can be free from the chronic pain she’s suffered from for years. In fact just last week she walked 27km one day and climbed five peaks two days after. Thirty two year old me can do that, you see. I didn’t believe in her but she showed me that being open to our own capability and capacity can produce wondrous results. 

So, my gentle challenge to you this week, my call to action, is to write your own version. What have you done recently that scared you? Did the outcome you feared actually happen? What do you do because you’ve always done it and never questioned it? What would you like to do, but don’t, because you’re worried other people would judge you?

Bringing about real change in our lives and the world around us requires us to recognise our patterns and beliefs that hold us back and keep us stuck. My belief that I could never move through the world without physical pain. My belief that I could only be feminine with long hair. 

What happens this month if you ask yourself what the you of right now, right this moment, wants and needs? What are they asking you to stop or start doing? Let them speak to you, listen to them. 

Maybe, just maybe, you’ll end up on stage in a bedazzled gilet doing a striptease to Dolly Parton’s 9-5. No? Just me then…