Nowadays my personal growth from the last couple of years over self love and other elements of love seems to be culminating over a certain break point. I have learnt through persevering words and actions of others love and through introspection and identification plus fulfillment of my own needs that I do not have to necessarily hate myself. And that there are redeeming qualities in me that make me half decent. Even if all of these were false and I am completely rotten to the core and have only managed to delude myself into thinking otherwise I still have the ultimate failsafe of claiming that I am a human.
Loving myself has also allowed me to more than just tolerate others. Words like empathy, care and compassion that previously felt bookish and only found in the dictionary now reside in quiet corners of my heart waiting to unleash themselves at the appropriate instances. So yes, love has been dumped onto me but I have eked out measly portions of it to others, still greedily holding most of it but occasionally dishing it out. Which has also made me much more sensitive to emotions. Maybe half a decade ago I would’ve said that such sentiments make me weak. In fact I still have similar notions. But they’re weaker now. This amalgam of emotions makes me privy to other’s mood and makes me read too much into their meaningless actions or words. I give them too much worth sometimes and it ends up hurting me.
I am writing about this very hurt. I think one of the worst possible things that can happen to a person is to not be loved unconditionally. Not being loved at all is still tolerable. There is room there for some sort of improvement. A complete absence denotes to the possibility of a potential presence. Self hate isn’t imposed by others but is done by the self and hence cannot be the worst possible thing because the self always acts in its own self interest, sometimes it manifests in nihilistic masochistic ways. The tragedy of modern times is that all of us are more or less loved. It would be hard to pin down a person and ask them, do you think no one loves you? Images of better halves, children, parents, siblings, friends, pets, that one relative who resides on an echelon above others, all of these entities and more just flash past your eyes and even if you are compelled to say ‘Yes’, you still hesitate. And that hesitation is enough of an answer.
Parental love is conditional. They have their own interests and suppressed self-expressions that they either mould you into achieving or expect you to stay true to their guidelines. The very act of birth and conception is selfish and stinks of a yearning for legacy in the face of mediocrity and pressure of evolution or the continuity of the entire species. Love from an offspring is ‘pay back’. The love from romantic partners has the potential of being fueled by lust. And the love from siblings stems from shared experiences or a more visceral way of putting it is ‘blood’. Most other loves including friends, companions, relatives and pets have much more materialistic conditions associated with their love that I do not need to necessarily list down. Neither will I generalize these assumptions for fear of rare individual experiences. And don’t get me started on God.
The trouble with no unconditional love is the lull that hits you in between bouts of normalcy. The smallest sign of distress or mental fatigue, any predilection towards mental instability is a harbinger for much more serious and worrying thought processes.
You aren’t allowed to say no one loves you.
And at that exact moment, you cannot also quite pinpoint who loves you.
A quantum state.
There is an impulse to lash out and stop fulfilling all the conditions that allow you to be loved. To really and truly become the ‘bad boy’. But then the scary prospect of being alienated and in the cold grasps of an emotionless cruel world terrifies us.
The other more sane, typical and thus the cowardly option is to take a big gulp and just swallow whatever ego you have, to not pay any heed to any distress or any disruption in your precariously balanced on the tip of the needle relationship. Just continue it. Keep fulfilling whatever conditions that you must. Consider it a task if you’ve to.
Remember what crumb you get of love, by whatever means necessary and at whatever steep price is worth it at the end of the day, in this soulless piece of rock that we have already been doomed to live on.
You aren’t allowed to say no one loves you.
And at that exact moment, you cannot also quite pinpoint who loves you.
A quantum state.
There is an impulse to lash out and stop fulfilling all the conditions that allow you to be loved. To really and truly become the ‘bad boy’. But then the scary prospect of being alienated and in the cold grasps of an emotionless cruel world terrifies us.
The other more sane, typical and thus the cowardly option is to take a big gulp and just swallow whatever ego you have, to not pay any heed to any distress or any disruption in your precariously balanced on the tip of the needle relationship. Just continue it. Keep fulfilling whatever conditions that you must. Consider it a task if you’ve to.
Remember what crumb you get of love, by whatever means necessary and at whatever steep price is worth it at the end of the day, in this soulless piece of rock that we have already been doomed to live on.
