They come after we’re ready, after we’ve already cleared out the damage and debris, only after we’ve learned what it means to love ourselves. It is in this we realize that love is sharing what we already have, not relying on someone else to give us something to supplement. It is in this we realize how crucial it was to love the people who could not love us back. They were never meant to, and the rest only depends on how long it takes us to realize this.
86
NOT EVERYBODY
WILL LOVE YOU
in a way you
UNDERSTAND
So much of the tension that turns to friction and so much of the friction that creates the fault lines that erupt in our relationships has to do with the ways we perceive love, the ways we expect it, and how the love we think we deserve does or doesn’t match up to what we get and, oftentimes, give.
For a lot of people, it’s not about whether or not they’re in love with someone; it’s the nuances that come along with being in love. It’s how they’re in love with them. It’s the ounce of uncertainty we’re told we shouldn’t have. The notion that they’re so young. That someone without such-and-such an issue could come along and be better than what they have now. That there is better out there. The ex who’s more convenient, the distance, the fear of commitment. The timing, the distractions, the impulse to try something else.
And every last one of us can admit to knowing what it’s like to be circling through these notions, trapped between loving someone and wanting to choose otherwise.
The problem is that we seldom realize that the heart is not a one-time-expended thing. You can’t put someone in it and expect that to heal the scarred contours. You have to realize that often, the struggle is that we leave, even though we love them, and we fight, even though we love them, and we do wrong by them, even though we love them, and it’s not because we don’t love them enough, but that all of these things can coexist within us, and the presence of one love doesn’t make another go away. But it doesn’t heal the hurt at its root, either. It can just mask it for a little bit.
We can expect that our hearts are able to hold more than one thing, more than one person, more than one feeling—but we cannot expect that they’ll all coexist perfectly. Love grows, and it grows you from the inside out. It expands you, but the expansion doesn’t eliminate whatever else was there beforehand.
So it doesn’t always look the way we think it should. There are hidden spaces and depths within us, and love sometimes comes out differently when it creates the echo of going through those parts of us as well.
Some people love silently. Some love without ever realizing they’re in love—love doesn’t look loving at all. It’s masked by fear, forced into remission, and acted on in bouts of anger and disappointment. Sometimes it’s not being able to look at someone after they’re gone, sometimes it’s not being able to stop, and most times it’s not being able to tell them either way.
It sometimes comes out punishing like the parents who try to force us into compliance, not realizing that you cannot shame people into changing. That their expression of anger is a mechanism of their ego, not of their love. We are not inherently whole once we’ve found another person to fit into us.
Nobody can do that for us. We have to fill those spaces ourselves.
So sometimes it goes misunderstood. But the comfort is in knowing that it’s not what we misunderstand about love as much as it is about how we let the misunderstanding open and expand us. You let the love, and all the twisted ways it’s morphed and sullied, push you into transforming yourself and your life out of necessity. You eventually realize it was love that created you, not the pain that is the byproduct of lost love. And it wasn’t the love someone didn’t give; it was the love you had to find in yourself.
The only matter is that we let love do what it’s supposed to: give us more of it, even—and probably especially—when it means we have to take it for ourselves. Sometimes we choose people to show us the hidden parts of ourselves. Sometimes we choose people who we know will hurt us.
Sometimes it’s the only way we can be acquainted with our inner beings, and even though we don’t understand it, it’s often the most honest, beautiful way we love ourselves, too.
87
HOW TO TAME
your inner
DEMONS
I used to think that taming your inner demons was a matter of transcending them. I used to believe that the gnawing notion of “not good enough” would be silenced when I was able to move past my mind’s eye, because of course, our inner demons do not base their case in reality.
Our inner demons strike us at our sore spots. They recite to us all the things that we fear people will interpret us to be. They keep us stuck in the place where what other people perceive is reality, though of course, those perceptions are extensions of those people, and these ones are ours.
I thought they would dissolve as soon as I stopped looking at my life analytically and started going through the motions as the person experiencing my thoughts and feelings, not the person who is my thoughts and feelings. But what I came to realize is that every part of you must work in tandem. And as soon as I needed to do something requiring thought and process, I was back to square one.
It’s nothing to get over and it’s nothing to disregard. It’s only something to acknowledge and understand and then cultivate differently. Because mindset is a cultivation, and to that end, it is ultimately a choice. We can change it. If we don’t, we will remain at the whim of other people’s actions and our own irrational gremlins that do nothing but prevent us from living out what we know to be true. And when these two forces collide and disrupt one another, we’ll find ourselves in the pits of anxiety and depression, because something is trying to make its way out of us, and something else is preventing it from doing so.
The antidote here is awareness. As soon as you realize your thought is coming from a place of irrationality and fear, you’ve taken a step toward silencing it. As soon as you discover that you don’t have to listen to that voice and that you are not that voice, you no longer have to be controlled by it.
You’ll start to understand that having self-doubt is human. Irrational fears are, too. There’s no part of this that’s weird or strange or wrong. It’s simply nature. But if we want to step beyond it, we have to reach beyond it and start choosing. Choosing what we consume, how we structure our days, and what we give our time to. What we assign value and meaning to, and how much.
Our natural, default setting isn’t the one we have to operate on for the rest of our lives. The longer we stay in allowing ourselves to be completely overtaken by every deprecating thought that runs through our minds, we’ll continue to cement ourselves beneath those beliefs, and they’ll become real.
Because this isn’t about believing that one day, we’ll never have passing thoughts of judgment toward ourselves. This isn’t about thinking we’ll ever not care what other people think, even just a little. These aspects of humanness are universal and unchanging and programmed for a reason. But those reasons have little to do with us finding happiness. And we have to make the choice for ourselves. We’ll never not care and we’ll never not hear them. It’s only a matter of whether or not we’ll act based on them.
88
WHY WE REJECT
positive THINKING
A large reason why people write off self-help or positive psychology as
“fluff” is because of how impossible it seems to accomplish. Positive thinking seems simple enough, so why is it that we have such a difficult time with it?
Well, the answer is simple, and it’s not: There’s a lot of subconscious bias against positive thinking, and that accumulates after long periods of time reinforcing your negative beliefs. To shift to a more positive mindset requires getting past that first period of angry disbelief. Here, a few other reasons why we reject positivity:
01. We see it as naïve.
We falsely associate “negativity” with “depth,” and so to be aware of the negative (or to be unenthused, under-emotional or passive) is to also be “cool.” (This is why we think of the “cool kids” in school as not caring much.)
02. We’re constantly reinforcing our subconscious belief in the negative.
The very nature of personal belief is “that which experience has proven true to us.” This is impossible, however, when we are subconsciously seeking out evidence to support the negative ideas we are constantly entertaining.
