The Missing Piece

I’ve spent decades reading dozens of self-help books. I am a self-help book guru. I didn’t intend to be this way because I like many kinds of books, but I always gravitate back to this genre because I have been on a never-ending journey to heal whatever that feeling is on the inside of me that won’t go away. It is a dull pain, a droning sound like a bad tire on an old car, and the sound and the feeling of it torment me. Many books gave me helpful nuggets that made me feel good and I would write them down and ponder upon my new-found knowledge and how to apply it to my life. Each book would be “exactly what my life was missing and what I’ve needed all along” until it wasn’t a few weeks later. The content faded from my memory and those nuggets of wisdom were never significant enough to be applied, or they altogether just didn’t work. But I never stopped my quest, I kept searching.

After my Mom passed away, I vowed to myself that I would live. But no matter how hard I tried to find the right philosophy, the right faith, the right belief, the right strategy, the right 7 steps, I was still lost. One year turned into five turned into ten and I was still not “living”. I was surviving. I was existing, solely for the purpose that someday in the future I would put my life’s pieces together and begin enjoying them. I was living for some time in the future but never for today. Somehow my searching was supposed to be enough, like the answer would eventually just be there in my life. That never happened.

The truth I was searching for through the books I was reading somehow found me instead of me finding it.

The truth I was searching for through the books I was reading somehow found me instead of me finding it. It was an interesting day. Sadness and heaviness had fallen on me on what seemed like a very normal day. I had been productive and energetic and somewhat happy that day. At first I thought it was sadness for friends who were going through difficult times as there were several and things seemed to be snowballing. But as I searched my feelings, it wasn’t them. It was my sadness, but for what I didn’t know. I could feel it rush over me, almost instantly. I stopped what I was doing immediately and went and lied down. I was restless though and I couldn’t relax. I needed to identify this feeling. And then, I rolled over and looked at the ceiling and spoke these words for what I think are the very first time in my life, “I need to learn how to love myself or I’m not going to survive. Self-love is the foundation for everything. It is the most necessary life skill there is. When you love yourself you don’t need other people to fill any void in your life.” My heart began beating slower and softer and fuller than it ever had. My body relaxed and my mind felt clear. I was in a new place mentally and emotionally. I quickly grabbed my journal off of the nightstand and wrote the words I had just spoken. If I didn’t and couldn’t remember them the following day I would have missed out on the greatest lesson I’d learned so far in my life, and what I believe I had been searching for to fill that massive void in my life. And it came to me without the help of any book, podcast, video, sermon, teaching, or friend’s advice. It just came, like a soft breeze through the window.

I was taught from a young age and told repeatedly throughout my life that God loved me and that should be enough. However, I never “felt” like God loved me. I didn’t want to bother him with the mess of my life. I had gotten myself into it and I felt too ashamed to let him love me. Even recently my therapist had challenged me to try to focus on God’s love for me and allow myself to feel his love. Yet here I was exploring the idea of love for the first time in my life and trying to love myself. So, if God truly does love me and I am now learning to love myself then it is God who is loving me through me. However it needs to work for me, it works. It was the truth that lifted me off the ground, so to speak. It broke things loose for me, and I began to feel natural feelings of calm in my life that I had never experienced before. Having spent so many years being overwhelmed by fear and anxiety, this was definitely new and exciting for me.

Some of the beliefs I had about myself have been there my entire life

Some of the beliefs I had about myself have been there my entire life, feelings that I didn’t fit in, I didn’t belong anywhere, I was different, I was insecure and scared, I didn’t know how to talk to people, no one wanted to be my friend, no one would ever love me, and that I was unable to take care of myself. I looked upon others to love me when I couldn’t. I needed them to fill all the empty areas of my life. I believed I didn’t know how. As long as I had people in my life who loved me, I could get through each day with enough content to masquerade as happiness. This was the lie I told myself. I would make them responsible for what I needed. However, the fear and the panic came back. It would catch me off guard, even in moments when I thought everything in my life was going great. When I had a great job, a good marriage, plenty of money, a church to go to, I would still have feelings of sadness come over me. Rather than searching myself, I blamed my spouse for my feelings of heaviness. He wasn’t making me happy, he wasn’t doing what I needed him to do to fill this void. I focused on this belief for a very long time. My thoughts recycled each day as they do when we are searching for answers, and I finally concluded my life would be better without him so that I could “finally find love”.

Terrified of being alone, I quickly searched for someone else who could give me what I needed. The relationships I was in were all terrible, and each person was to blame. I would tell my friends as if I never saw it coming. I wasted so much time. I pointed fingers. I blamed. All while I was still utterly and completely broken and lost and the only person who had the power to make the change was me. I had the keys to the new shiny car in my hands all the time and was too busy blaming others to see how incredibly simple the answer truly was.

After all of the self-help books I read and it never occurred to me that the answer to fixing me was to love me. Surely at some point I had read it or heard it. More than likely I did and dismissed it as either corny cliché or something I would eventually get around to when I was loved enough by others. It didn’t work that way. In fact, I was never going to find love until I loved myself first. No one ever could have done this FOR ME- not ever. No one can teach you how to love yourself except you, not even your parents. Their responsibility is to raise us in a loving environment where we can grow and learn on our own and become our best selves, full of respect and love for our self. Learning to love our self is up to us.

Loving myself is the single most important life skill I can have. It is the foundation for everything.

• You will defend yourself when you love yourself

• When you love yourself, you won’t allow people to take advantage of you

• When you love yourself, you never side with a mean person about what you do or don’t deserve.

• Loving yourself leaves you with a peace that allows you to endure disappointment without demanding explanations, apologies, or correction of others. You can allow others to be their imperfect selves.

• Loving yourself prevents you from pointing out the faults of others when you had expectations of them filling a void in your life.

• When other people sense your self-love they will respect you enough to not bully you.

• When a girl loves herself, she will find a man who loves her as well. End of story.

How will I learn to love myself? I didn’t know where to begin, so I started by asking myself these questions:

• When was the last time you remembered someone truly loving you? What did they say? What did they say about you?

• What do you like to do? What makes you happy?

• What are your best qualities? Be honest. Brag about yourself. You know what you are good at, it’s not a bad thing to say what they are.

• Can you look at yourself in the mirror? Try. What do you see? What are the good things you see? Be honest. Again, brag about yourself. It’s not a bad thing to know what your positive qualities are. It will help you when someone wants to take a picture of you. You can accentuate your best qualities and like pictures of yourself again (this has been missing, right?)

• Loving yourself should not be confused with arrogance or self-promotion. People know the difference.

Because I didn’t love myself, I was unable to love others.

• Once I begin to love myself, I will finally be willing and open to accepting the love of others. The kind of love that is true and honest and deep and meaningful.

• I will give myself an abundance of space to be alone with my thoughts and begin to speak to myself in a completely different way than I had before. Self-hatred no longer has a place in my life. It is time to turn the channel.

• I will begin to fill myself with love for myself first, and then for other people and things that are deserving of love that I never realized before. Love will find me. I will be a magnet for love.

I know that all of this isn’t the answer to everything. But this feels like the beginning of the answer to many things I have needed for a long time. If my life has been a mess because of the hatred I have felt towards myself, then surely the opposite would be true if I begin to let love in. How much good will come with the love I bring into my life? I am about to find out. It is a journey, a new journey, and it comes with a lot of excitement and anticipation. Now I am busy writing down all of my new thoughts and experiences and filling the pages of my journal not with 7 steps to this or that, but my new-found ideas that are streaming in… from that window with the breeze.