Hello my loves,
Once again, I arrive after an absence.
Recently, I listened to James Clear’s book, “Atomic Habits”. I cringe at these “optimise the human” viral narratives that dominate the (neoliberal) self-help space. At the same time, I’m constantly getting in my own way with the curse of overthinking/ perfectionist tendencies that roll into action paralysis.
One thing that stuck with me through Clear’s book was the idea that habit change means identity change. I do think of myself as a “chaotic person” and while we can debate over the chicken and egg origins of this personal belief, I wondered if by conceptualising myself as a “consistent person”: could I work toward embodying and applying the actions that would make this identity true? Let’s find out.
So, I have made myself a promise: to get past my overthinking perfectionism, I will post every blog I’ve left in the drafts for next few weeks.
On Love & (Undoing) the Fear of Being Alone:
bell hooks wrote, “but many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
I first read this in 2015, my dog-eared copy of bell hooks’ book “All About Love”. It was fucking uncomfortable. I loathed being alone. If someone asked me what my greatest fear was, it was never public speaking or heights or spiders. It was dying alone.
I often wondered if I used people as a way to create noise in the silence of the abyss that was sitting at my core? And I had to answer yes, repeatedly. It wasn’t malicious; it was just, sad. I wondered how many of the people I knew were also sad; that they masked it with big personalities and abusive behaviours because they too feared they were unlovable, that they too were afraid they would die alone.
For me, that’s the entanglement: love and fear. Without a grounded, loving sense of self, being alone feels like free-falling through the bottomlessness of space.
I picked up bell hooks’ book in 2015 because that was the first inkling I had that maybe, I had something I needed to learn. I needed to face how much I had learnt to hate myself and learn how to love myself instead; if I didn’t, I knew I’d find myself stuck in an endless cycle of toxic dependency, draining my partners to love me in the way that I couldn’t love myself.
My love language is quality time and words of affirmation. I used to think of love languages as something external; as in, a guide on how you love other people. I thought about how I make time to hang out with friends. I travel to visit them. I use endearments and tell them I love them and how proud I am of them because I think they’re all so fierce, smart and amazing (I’m not joking when I say sincerely believe that all my friends are fucking incredible human beings).
Then I realised that I didn’t do that for myself. I didn’t speak to myself with words of affirmation. In fact, I had quite the opposite: a regular loop of negative thoughts. I constantly neglected time for myself in favour of over-extending myself for others or feeling weird that I’d even want time alone. Time alone? Wasn’t that my like, worst fear?
Why was I giving something that I didn’t give to myself?
Learning to love myself was also about learning to face the abyss in silence. To sit with pain and accept it. To sit with the love I needed and permit myself to accept it. I needed to develop a new internal dialogue that offered words of self-love and affirmation, to upgrade the rusted old negative tracks.
I needed time alone to see and hear the void. To learn to love it, instead of fear it. By receiving the abyss with love, I could start to hold space for the light and the shadows splayed within it; to hear the sadness it held and learn what it needed to be soothed. In this, another phase of healing unfolds.
It wasn’t until my 30s that I started to fall in love with being alone by falling in love with myself: my inner self was a fun playground, a sacred site and a library. I came to enjoy my own company, nourishing myself with silence, movement (yoga and dance), books, day-dreaming and walks. I no longer feared being left alone with myself and all the demons in my head. They weren’t demons: they were children. Children who cried out in fear and tore up my brain with smoking burn-outs in pursuit of love and recognition. I hang out with my multiple selves; I am not a singular unit of being except as a body. It’s wonderful to discover how expansive my inner world is. Instead of fearing it as a void - I can embrace it for all its possibilities.
I have to add: none of this is possible without loving and being loved in return. I have a lot of gratitude for my partner, my friends and my family as we evolve through our life journeys together, and apart. I don’t believe in that crappy maxim that we must love ourselves first before we can love anyone else. Love is fundamentally relational; we learn in our families, among friends, through intimate relationships, at work, by communing with nature, in the spiritual realm, with ourselves... Learning to love doesn’t evolve in isolation: it happens through relations involving vulnerability, connection, mistakes, repair, being held, conflict, acceptance, joy, confrontation, transcendence and support. I believe the thing we call love is an unfixable thing: it suffocates inside rigid definitions and flourishes in expansiveness.
Love is a tangled mess; you can try to untangle it to theorise it but you cannot untangle it to experience it.
With love + solidarity,
Lamisse