To those who feel invisible.
Sometimes it hits me that the world would spin just fine without me. And it would, but I take it a step further, thinking that even the worlds of people who love me would spin just fine without me.
This piece started off as a real bummer, but sadly, I think it shows part of the reality a lot of us might feel. Understanding that we are not a protagonist in people’s lives is hard. Especially if we realize that we have continuously made other people the protagonists of ours.
I’ve caught myself so many times relying on if, and how much other people accept, love, or want to spend time with me, in order to assess my worth. And there are a lot of days where I feel like nobody really sees me.
I believed that once I began to love myself I wouldn’t give a shit about whether or not other people wanted to be with me. However, I am realizing that nothing is black and white. Loving myself gave me the freedom to be by myself without dreading my own thoughts. Loving myself helped me be more empathetic on the days when my world looks a little bit grey. Loving me, allowed me to better understand what I want and what I need, without needing other people’s acceptance about it — at least for the most part.
However, I try to see the process of self-love, more as a relationship rather than a journey with an end date. And technically, you never stop trying in a relationship that truly matters, with someone who is important to you. So, I still have so much to learn.
I still need to learn how to shut the world out when I catch myself caring too much about the social setting and norms. I still have to learn how to accept rejection without compromising my own view of myself. I have so much more to learn about how to love myself unconditionally, with all that I hate about me, and all that I barely tolerate.
So back to my main point. I believed that loving myself meant that nothing would rattle me anymore. And to some extent, this might be true, but I think people like to overgeneralize such statements, making them very ambiguous and misleading. Therefore, if we try to achieve self-love in the hopes that we won’t need other people altogether, then I think we are aiming for something both pointless and almost impossible.
Humans thrive through connecting with each other. We want to share our ideas and feelings. Happiness is multiplied when those around us feel the joy with us, and pain becomes a little more bearable when shared with a friend. This inevitably makes us vulnerable to other people’s perceptions and feelings, words, and actions.
I realized that I sometimes try to protect myself from the risk of being ignored, or neglected by those around me, by merely convincing myself that I don’t need anyone. Actually, my personal opinion is actually that we don’t really need anyone other than God, but I also bizarrely believe that this means we need one another as well.
I often isolate myself so that I don’t risk being in the position of being hurt. I put on a costume of independence half of which is genuine and half of which I don’t even know where it came from. I’ve defined independence as the ability and choice to exist alone — even though I doubt this is even healthy.
Rejection sucks. It feels like something about you isn’t quite as needed. It feels like someone is building a small wall in front of you telling you that you might not be that interesting after all. And soon enough, you join in. You start building the wall yourself. This often leads to trying to convince yourself that you are better off behind this wall you’ve built — burying inside of it part of what makes you, you — your ability to connect with others.
I’m trying to understand how we can truly love ourselves even when we feel like maybe there’s not much to love. I’m not really sure I have an answer yet. But I do know this. We usually construct interpretations of other people’s actions based on our own beliefs and views of the world and ourselves. So if you believe you aren’t worthy of love, you interpret actions based on this biased assumption you hold about yourself. For example, if someone smiles at you and then looks away, you might interpret it as their way of saying you are not interesting enough to look at or meet. We generalize what we see and think and apply our beliefs to reality in order to match situations to what we have known until now — which part of it might be completely based on our own hurtful beliefs.
If you feel like you don’t like who you are, chances are, someone planted that inside of you — through a word, an action, anything — but this doesn’t make it the end. I like to live my life believing that we have control over a few but fundamental things. One of them is interpretation. How we interpret and perceive ourselves, the world, and those around us.
So, what if what we really fear could be improved through acceptance? Real, forgiving, unconditionally loving acceptance?
What if we rose up and saw ourselves? With all of our imperfections, strange idiosyncrasies, flaws, and beauty? What if, all that we want starts from inside?
