I don’t know about you, but any time I go on social media, I’m inundated with the message of “self-love”. It’s this amorphous, nebulous thing that you better have, or else you’re essentially fucked.
If you don’t love yourself, you can’t be in a relationship.
If you don’t love yourself, you can’t realize your dreams.
If you don’t love yourself - you can’t [fill in the blank].
My question is, what in the fuck does that mean? There are never any instructions. Is self love taking a bath on a Tuesday night? Is it not eating that extra piece of pie? Is it masturbating in the mirror? Jokes aside, Narcissus himself is undoubtedly laughing.
I want to propose a wild idea (admittedly, it’s not entirely my own). Self-love is a myth. It’s on par with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It’s an unachievable machination of our obsessive self-help culture that does more harm than good. Unless you believe you are the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, the Buddha, or have an extremely deranged Narcissistic Personality Disorder, you’ll always be chasing the self-love carrot being dangled in front of you.
Enter self-neutrality.
Somewhere between the lands of self-hatred and self-love exists self-neutrality. It sounds something like this:
“I don’t hate myself, nor do I fully love myself. I’m a human being, a constant work in progress, and there are parts of me that I like, and other parts of me I dislike. I’m never going to get to the point where I absolutely love everything about myself, but that doesn’t mean I have to beat myself up over it. I’m equal parts light and dark, and, like everyone else, I’m trying to figure out my place on this spinning rock in the middle of space.”
You get the idea. The idea of self-neutrality eliminates the constant pressure of “getting to the destination,” which is essentially what self-love promulgates. There is no destination, it’s only a journey. And just because you haven’t reached the pinnacle of self-love, it doesn’t mean you hate yourself, either. There’s a place in-between, and at the end of the day, it’s where most of actually reside.
This may be a strange message coming from someone who straddles the extremes in so many areas, but it’s through those extremes that I’ve been able to see the path to neutrality. I’ve spent seasons hating myself, and I’ve spent seasons obsessed with myself, “loving” myself. The results weren’t that different. The greatest seasons of my life were the ones where I just lived, holding both the hatred and the love. I grew tremendously in those seasons, and I was able to actually be present to others rather than be so focused on myself.
What do you think? Is self-love a myth?