With Love From Me To You
You are going to write this post.
You're not going to worry about whether it's pretty, or whether it's good, or whether anyone wants to read it or cares about how you feel. You're still going to write this post.
You feel like shit tonight. It's understandable. It's been a full decade since you said goodbye to Cathy on what would be the last day you ever saw her. In a few months, she would break up with you, and you would experience the darkest few years of your adult life.
But then you get into this thing where you want to feel sad, you know? You want to feel sad because you're used to feeling sad. It's habit. It's impulse. I get it.
You tell yourself things like 'if I did have somebody in my life I could be truly intimate with, it'd be easier to lose weight, or feel motivated,' or whatever other bullshit you wish you would do but don't. And then you feel bad because 'that's how toxic masculinity works,' and you get caught up in this other bit of self-loathing about how growing up in a flawed society instills those flaws in you, and it's just this mobius strip of self-criticism.
That's how you stay stuck. That's what keeps you from doing those things you want to do.
It would be one thing if that was how you felt all the time, wouldn't it? That would just be life, and it wouldn't be as frustrating as it is for you. It's frustrating because sometimes you feel better. Sometimes you feel powerful, and you feel love for yourself, which you spent most of your life not doing, and now that you've gotten the taste, now that you've seen some sort of daylight, it frustrates the hell out of you that you get brought back into the darkness.
That's understandable, too.
The cliche is that you can't love another until you love yourself, right? I say it's cliche because it's the kind of vague proverb that fails to truly convey the weight behind it, even if it's true. It's also instantly contradicted by modern presentations of 'romance,' where a person is portrayed as just not quite being complete without having a significant other. That's the culture of toxic masculinity, the one that makes having that relationship an essential commodity.
That's a diatribe for another time, though. This here is about you, and some things that you need to say to yourself.
Over the last 20 years of your life, you have been building a machine. You have been building an identity, pieced together from the one your father shattered in its infancy. You have painstakingly worked to build this sense of self from basically nothing. You have shattered it and started over. You have refined it as you learned new things, both about yourself and the world around you. You have sheltered it from countless storms, even as you relied upon it for the strength to do so.
Finally, you've begun to live inside this construct of yours. That is why you're getting those tastes of happiness. The machine is coming to life, just as intended.
And you know what this machine can do. You've seen hints of it. You've seen the threads that led to its creation, and you've followed all the permutations to glimpse the vision of what you know to be your true self. You're almost there, but there's something holding you back. There's one key cog that's missing.
It's this habitual shit, right? It's this notion of being stuck in a rut, and being doomed to repeat these cycles of self-loathing and anguish. And it sucks because you make that connection with why your father was the way he was. Bad shit happened to him, and he never really had the wherewithal to choose to not let it define him, to choose to overcome it.
Do you remember when you made that choice? I know you do. It was when you pulled that towel rod out of the wall when you were 15, and you stormed out of the bathroom and stomped up to your mother and demanded that she apologize for saying you were anything like your father. She did, as she shrank and averted her gaze. You didn't know it at the time, but you still had the rod in your hand. She was so terrified, and you were so angry, and it ultimately led to you being kicked out of normal school and sent to spend your 16th birthday among thieves and pedophiles.
You would soon come to realize that you were, in fact, your father.
You're pretty good at writing, but I don't know if we can really summarize what happened next. You spent years trying to make yourself better. You consciously chose to not be what your father was, to not be a slave to your rage and your agony, to step back and have actual, honest-to-god perspective, to see yourself in others, to have empathy and compassion and love for literally fucking everyone, to feel the weight of generations of dysfunction on both sides of your family and defy it, to not be dictated by the world around you, to not be controlled by anyone but yourself, to be who you wanted to be.
And you did all of it!
If you can't love that, if you can't look at what you've done and see the devastating beauty of who and what you are, if you can't appreciate the things you have done, then you know that any relationship you had right now would end the same way as the last one did.
That is what that proverb means. You do not need a relationship to be complete. You are already complete.
You are already complete.
You are already complete.
You are already beautiful.
You are already successful.
You are already worthy of love.
You already make a positive impact in people's lives.
You are already a good and worthwhile person.
All you have to do now is accept it. Accept that I love you. Accept that you love you.
Accept that you've already won.
You're not going to worry about whether it's pretty, or whether it's good, or whether anyone wants to read it or cares about how you feel. You're still going to write this post.
You feel like shit tonight. It's understandable. It's been a full decade since you said goodbye to Cathy on what would be the last day you ever saw her. In a few months, she would break up with you, and you would experience the darkest few years of your adult life.
But then you get into this thing where you want to feel sad, you know? You want to feel sad because you're used to feeling sad. It's habit. It's impulse. I get it.
You tell yourself things like 'if I did have somebody in my life I could be truly intimate with, it'd be easier to lose weight, or feel motivated,' or whatever other bullshit you wish you would do but don't. And then you feel bad because 'that's how toxic masculinity works,' and you get caught up in this other bit of self-loathing about how growing up in a flawed society instills those flaws in you, and it's just this mobius strip of self-criticism.
That's how you stay stuck. That's what keeps you from doing those things you want to do.
It would be one thing if that was how you felt all the time, wouldn't it? That would just be life, and it wouldn't be as frustrating as it is for you. It's frustrating because sometimes you feel better. Sometimes you feel powerful, and you feel love for yourself, which you spent most of your life not doing, and now that you've gotten the taste, now that you've seen some sort of daylight, it frustrates the hell out of you that you get brought back into the darkness.
That's understandable, too.
The cliche is that you can't love another until you love yourself, right? I say it's cliche because it's the kind of vague proverb that fails to truly convey the weight behind it, even if it's true. It's also instantly contradicted by modern presentations of 'romance,' where a person is portrayed as just not quite being complete without having a significant other. That's the culture of toxic masculinity, the one that makes having that relationship an essential commodity.
That's a diatribe for another time, though. This here is about you, and some things that you need to say to yourself.
Over the last 20 years of your life, you have been building a machine. You have been building an identity, pieced together from the one your father shattered in its infancy. You have painstakingly worked to build this sense of self from basically nothing. You have shattered it and started over. You have refined it as you learned new things, both about yourself and the world around you. You have sheltered it from countless storms, even as you relied upon it for the strength to do so.
Finally, you've begun to live inside this construct of yours. That is why you're getting those tastes of happiness. The machine is coming to life, just as intended.
And you know what this machine can do. You've seen hints of it. You've seen the threads that led to its creation, and you've followed all the permutations to glimpse the vision of what you know to be your true self. You're almost there, but there's something holding you back. There's one key cog that's missing.
It's this habitual shit, right? It's this notion of being stuck in a rut, and being doomed to repeat these cycles of self-loathing and anguish. And it sucks because you make that connection with why your father was the way he was. Bad shit happened to him, and he never really had the wherewithal to choose to not let it define him, to choose to overcome it.
Do you remember when you made that choice? I know you do. It was when you pulled that towel rod out of the wall when you were 15, and you stormed out of the bathroom and stomped up to your mother and demanded that she apologize for saying you were anything like your father. She did, as she shrank and averted her gaze. You didn't know it at the time, but you still had the rod in your hand. She was so terrified, and you were so angry, and it ultimately led to you being kicked out of normal school and sent to spend your 16th birthday among thieves and pedophiles.
You would soon come to realize that you were, in fact, your father.
You're pretty good at writing, but I don't know if we can really summarize what happened next. You spent years trying to make yourself better. You consciously chose to not be what your father was, to not be a slave to your rage and your agony, to step back and have actual, honest-to-god perspective, to see yourself in others, to have empathy and compassion and love for literally fucking everyone, to feel the weight of generations of dysfunction on both sides of your family and defy it, to not be dictated by the world around you, to not be controlled by anyone but yourself, to be who you wanted to be.
And you did all of it!
If you can't love that, if you can't look at what you've done and see the devastating beauty of who and what you are, if you can't appreciate the things you have done, then you know that any relationship you had right now would end the same way as the last one did.
That is what that proverb means. You do not need a relationship to be complete. You are already complete.
You are already complete.
You are already complete.
You are already beautiful.
You are already successful.
You are already worthy of love.
You already make a positive impact in people's lives.
You are already a good and worthwhile person.
All you have to do now is accept it. Accept that I love you. Accept that you love you.
Accept that you've already won.
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