Open Ears

I'm sitting down to write for the first time since October. It's February. It's interesting how something so important to you could be put on the back burner for so long.

Getting thoughts out about anything has been a true struggle for me lately. I've been masking a lot of my issues with smaller situations that I blow out of proportion. I make excuses not to think about my progression or regression, further inducing the destructive behaviors I've had for the last 5 years. My greatest skill and biggest fall back.

The last few months I've been pretty aggressively forced to put some of my behaviors into perspective. I've been pretty fucking sad about how some things have played out, but it's been revealing some important ideas to me.

It's almost been 4 years (June 2017) since I've been completely single and not involved with someone romantically. I was always steadily involved with someone at every single point. Even when I was 8,000 miles from home, I had my first involvement with a girl who lived back in Indiana. I've always searched for love and affection from someone else. I have been so dependent on the words, the affection, and the actions of outsiders. Over the last 4 years, I've been in 6 relationships and before today, I never believed you had to love yourself before you got into one. I thought whoever made that up was an absolute idiot and had clearly never loved someone with mental illness. After my most recent relationship, though, I'm starting to actually believe it. I've been involved with three women over the last two years and I keep having the same problems. There were unique problems in them all of course, but when it came down to me individually, they were all stemming from the same thing. I didn't love myself at all. I still wanted to die, I was still starving myself, and I still hadn't found an identity outside of my disorders and illnesses. Seven months of mental health treatment and I still hadn't truly been committed to giving myself more... more than just that pain. I never understood why not loving myself would affect my relationships. They were supposed to love me, right? Why does it matter if I don't love myself? And now that I type that, I realize how selfish it is, expecting someone to love me enough for the both of us. No wonder my partners have been so incredibly tired. And I told all of those women I loved them. But did I? How would I know real love if I don't even know the simplest form of it... the love of oneself?

When I started treatment at St. Vincent in November 2019, I was very distraught over the fact that I didn't know who I was. I knew I was heartbroken, tired, malnourished, confused, and incredibly pissed off but I had no idea what to do with those things besides just keel over and die. I didn't want to do anything about it, either, actually. I was lazy and didn't want to listen to anyone tell me what to do to get better. I'm realizing now that I've had that attitude for a LONG time. I started therapy for the first time when I was 14; I went once and thought it was dumb so I quit. The next time I started therapy was after I tried to hit one of my close friends at the time when I was 18. Aggression and anger being something I'd been advised to try to work through during those 4 years by several people, but something I let go in one ear and out the other until that moment with my friend. I signed up for therapy the next day.

After starting therapy and continuing it for 4 1/2 years now, I've let the same thing happen several times. My therapist advises me on a topic, I don't listen, down the road a situation on that topic blows up, and then I start listening. I don't think I ever cared enough about myself to change anything until it visibly hurt the people around me. I let the glass pour and pour over enough times and eventually the people around me, and specifically the people I was romantically involved with, began to drown.

The person I dated on and off in 2020, finally pounded it into my brain that self-love is essential to life. What is the point of life if not to be secure and have faith in my own bones? Even after a year of being involved to some degree, it's just now hitting me that she was right all along. As I cry and type, I understand how hard it is to love someone who doesn't love themselves. How painful it is to see the person you love so fully have such self destructive behaviors, to see them become dependent on your love because they don't have enough of it within themselves. And knowing that sometimes the best thing you can do is leave. Leave not because you don't love them, but because you love yourself more.

Ultimately, what I know about my identity now is that I am stubborn, I'm a bad listener, and I have a huge ego.

What I also know is that I have other qualities worthy of loving and for the first time, as I'm writing this, I'm telling myself that I have the capacity to love them. I never thought I had room to love myself, that it would be selfish if I did, or that I wouldn't have anything left to give to others. But for some reason, I think now that the more I love myself, I'll have better and healthier love to give to others when the time comes.

I think I understand the saying now.

Love it already,

Tess M