"I Just Want To Be Loved"
“I just want to be loved.” says the person who hates themselves. They will do anything for it. Be anyone. Most of all they want to be loved by everyone, even the people who hate them, even the people who don’t deserve their own love. They are trying to love everyone because they can’t love themselves.
It’s a mischaracterisation. A good piece of advice I once read was to talk to people in a way that reflects the relationship you want with them. If you want to be friends with someone, talk to them as if they are already your friend.
But you can’t love people into loving you. I don’t know why this doesn’t work, I just know it’s true. I think maybe it just doesn’t work if you don’t love yourself, because you can’t really truly love anyone if you don’t love yourself. Maybe that’s how it works, you can only emulate things you genuinely believe and understand.
I don’t know I have a fever of 40 and I’m out of alcohol to keep me asleep. I just keep drinking water and like a child my body spews it out of my skin to be sucked up by the greedy airconditioner.
Where was I?
Right. “I just want to be loved.”
It’s odd because I keep seeing people try to love other people when they clearly don’t love themselves all the time. The people who do this are screaming out this message silently. On the surface level it’s: “I love you, I will always be here for you.”
It always seems like that is the message that they want to hear. They do not feel worthy of love. They do not love themselves. They want a mirror for the message, but ironically enough the message they are sending is false. The message is “I am giving you something I want to receive, disguised as something I want to give you.” It’s a Trojan Horse.
You have to be careful with words. I don’t mean lies, I mean words in general, their semantics, their connotations, delivery, intent. Saying what you mean, and making sure you actually understand what you’re saying. That’s what this entire website is about. Me figuring out how to understand, how to comprehend or interpret what I am saying, and making sure the word matches the meaning and intent.
I don’t hate saying the words “I love you.” It’s just something I can’t say anymore, because it only ever feels like I don’t mean it or I am actually saying “Please love me”.
It’s part of why I’m still a mess. If I let myself come across as carefree, comedic, blasé, ironic, it frees me of the consequences of words actually meaning something. You’re now in on the ‘joke’, there is now ambiguity, we are all freed from my incompetence. I could tell you anything and it wouldn’t matter if I was wrong or right, because the presentation is that the actual matter of the communication means nothing.
The communication is a lack of my willingness, my fear, my terror of speaking. There’s some saying about comedians telling the truth that no one wants to hear, but being able to get away with it because it is veiled in comedy, and therefore isn’t serious or real. It’s the same idea. I violate the communication and we all get to pretend like it’s okay. But I’m not a comedian. I’m just a very sad, messed up and alienated dude who is trying really hard not to give up on life but also not become religious.
So, be careful with your love. Think about what it means when you are offering someone love. Do you want to love them, because that means you will be loved, even though it’s impossible because you do not love yourself? Or do you actually love them?
Love is for its own sake. It is not for you.
I think that’s why so much of the self-love lecturing fails. “Love yourself. Love yourself. Love yourself. Be kind to yourself.”
But love is not a choice. Sure, I can emulate love, but it isn’t real, and I think that is truly one of the greatest sins of all: to lie about love. And people do it all the time under the justification that they are doing it for someone else instead of themselves.
You do not need to do something to love. It is self-evident. It is a state of being. When people say “I love you.” and they actually do, it is an affirmation, not a confirmation. The confirmation is being in love in the first place.
So the people who are telling you to love yourself are idiots. They are preaching to you to lie to yourself and others, probably because they are also lying to themselves and they don’t even know it, they are convinced love is not a self-evident state for its own sake. Love for them is a performance, like when I molest semantics and communication under the pretence of comedy. That sums up the modern nihilism of self-help and mental health guru-ism: Love is a performance now.
It’s not even a good performance depicting a Greek tragedy. It’s a b-list self-written stageplay funded by someone who doesn’t care about its outcome, the message, or the reception.
So how do you ‘love’ yourself then?
You’ll be pleased to hear my current theory comes from a reliable source, a garbled note I wrote on my phone while blind drunk:
“Maybe I don’t need to be medicated. Maybe I just need to stop doing things that make me want to die.”
Or, in other words: Stop doing things that make you hate yourself.
You can love someone with flaws. But it might struggle if there’s nothing but flaws. You can’t love a villain as much as that is the current trend in writing, the reason they’re ‘lovable’ is because they’re not actually villains.
That opens up at least the possibility for love. It opens up the possibility of that state. It opens up the possibility that you might do something that might make you like yourself. If you’re lucky it might even open up the possibility of someone liking you.
The statement must change from “I just want to be loved.” to “I have to stop doing things that make me unable to love myself.”