KNOW THYSELF TO LOVE THYSELF
Have you ever gone through a life changing breakup that turns your entire world view upside down?
When I was 25 I learned maybe the most important lesson of my entire life. I had just gone through an absolutely devastating break up with the woman of my dreams (at the time).
At that moment I couldn’t understand why or how the whole thing fell apart, and I’m sure a lot of you reading this have had similar experiences.
I thought healthy relationships looked a certain way, I thought that in order to get and keep love around I had to give every bit of myself to the other person to support and love them, and convince them to love me back.
I had heard the phrase “you show others how to love you” and thought that it meant what I just said in the paragraph above. Boy was I wrong.
It wasn’t until I figured out that the reason all of my romantic, professional, and friend relationships were dysfunctional, was because of MY RELATIONSHIP TO MYSELF WAS THE MOST DYSFUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIP IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.
For so many years I was fucking terrified of being alone.
Not in the grand, romantic scheme of things like you see in a hallmark movie or something.
I wasn’t afraid of ending up alone in my old age (I mean I was afraid of that too, but that wasn’t the core fear.)
I was afraid of spending any second alone with myself because I fucking HATED myself.
I hated my fat body. I hated my personality or what I thought was a lack thereof.
I hated my thoughts. I hated my intrusive thoughts. I hated my stupid fucking face.
I was not only my worst bully but I was my own worst enemy too.
I desperately searched for validation outside of myself. I developed unhealthy addictions and coping mechanisms. I stayed committed to friendships and people that didn’t deserve my presence or energy, and who didn’t want me around to be anything other than the butt of the joke for them.
I would binge eat because I hated myself for being fat, and then I would make myself more fat by binge eating. Then, I would go to the gym and spend the whole time comparing myself to others and when I didn’t look like them after one fucking workout I would stare at myself in the mirror at home telling myself how much of a worthless fat piece of shit I was.
I would have suicidal thoughts not just on a daily basis but an hourly one.
I mean, would you want to spend any time with yourself if you treated yourself like that?
No, neither would I.
So back to this break up.
I was in love with a Ballerina. If you know you know.
The validation I felt from this woman. Was the most addicting feeling I had ever felt in my entire life. If Opioids were a person…
So I poured every ounce of myself into her. Into the relationship, into the distraction it provided.
Now so many years have passed I realize that I wasn’t actually in love with her, I was in love with the way that she made me feel. I was in love with the way I made myself feel when I was with her.
I was in love with the distraction. Addicted to it.
I should have seen the signals long before it all blew up. When we were together it was great.
When we were apart, I was a nervous fucking wreck. Waiting for a text message back from her was like waiting for a letter from my child at war, awaiting any good news that they were alive.
The anxiety I would give myself when we weren’t together was sickening. And when we were together I suffocated her with my desperate need for love and assurance and validation.
We broke up twice.
Once in January of 2015, the day after I drunkenly looked deep into her eyes while we were having sex, and told her I loved her.
She looked away from me, collected her thoughts, and said that she couldn’t say it back.
*cue that tiktok sound: “And in this moment, he knew he fucked up”
She was the first person other than a family member I had ever told I loved.
And then I got dumped the next day.
Not great for your self esteem when it was already non-existent.
So what did I do?
I developed a new eating disorder and started starving myself to lose as much weight as I could to prove my worth to her, even though she didn’t want anything to do with me.
6 months went by and we did end up getting back together, but at an extreme cost to me.
The amount of bad life decisions that went into recapturing that feeling of validation I had lost when we broke up eventually added up to me having to burn my whole life to the ground and starting over after the second time we broke up.
She dumped me for the second time in early 2017. 11 days after I had left to go sing an opera in CA. Over the phone. 2 10 minute phone calls.
The life I thought I was going to have with her, gone in an instant. We never spoke again after that.
The pain was unbearable. I was far from home, surrounded by none of my support system, staring down my worst nightmare.
Being alone.
Eventually I realized that I had a choice. I could either spiral out of control, blow my life up even worse than I already had, and put a bullet in my mouth and end it all.
Or I could make the choice to fix my most dysfunctional relationship.
My relationship with myself.
Until you truly know yourself, and the love that you need to give to yourself, you will never be able to love or receive love from those around you.
It’s literally as simple as that.
And by simple I mean one of the most important and difficult things you will ever have to do.
But you have to. You owe it to your current self, your former self aka your inner child, and your future self.
We’ll talk more about how in the next letter. But for now I want to pose three questions to you.
When was the last time you sat with your inner child? The 5, 7, 10, 13 year old version of you who was desperate for love and care and attention but they didn’t get it from the adults in their life they needed to get it from? Well guess what, you are that adult now, and you can give that version of you the love they never got growing up.
What are you using to distract yourself from yourself? Can you make a list of these things?
What would it feel like to write a love letter to yourself? Do this and then send it back to me.
Hot Fat Guy out.
