Self-Love in the Moments I Don’t Like Myself

Part one: Staying on my own side when I am hurt

I thought I knew how to love myself until one comment about the child I had been left me crying for hours and blaming myself for my reaction.

I had spent years learning to care for myself. I worked out, ate well, took myself on solo dates, rested when I needed it and made time to be alone.

It looked like self-love, and in many ways it was.

During a family visit a few years ago, someone started talking about what I had been like as a child. She said I had cried all the time and described me as annoying and too much.

I felt the hurt immediately. But I did not say anything.

I tried to smile and carried on with the conversation. I wanted to tell her that the comment had hurt me, but I was afraid that if I showed how much the comment affected me, I would be judged and seen as too much. So I told myself: I do not cry. I am not too sensitive. I am cool and easy now. I have changed.

I remember trying to swallow past the tightness in my throat and keep breathing.

A few minutes later, I made an excuse and went downstairs to the toilet. As soon as I closed the door, the tears came.

I could hardly breathe. I kept thinking, What is happening to me? This is not normal.

Someone who had been upstairs must have noticed I was upset. She came down and knocked on the door. I could not open it. I did not want her to see me like that.

She opened the door anyway. She looked at me and hugged me, and I could no longer hold it in.

I cried loudly, and I kept crying for three hours that night. Early the next morning, I cried again on the flight, then over pasta and a glass of wine in the first Italian city we visited while my partner sat with me, trying to understand where all of it was coming from.

I did not know.

Only later did I understand why the comment had reached so far beyond that room. It seemed to confirm an old belief I had been carrying for years: that I was hard to love.

I thought I had healed that wound. I had spent years learning to give myself the care I had needed as a child. Yet in that room, I was still trying to prove that I was no longer the child she had described.

I wondered whether I was also crying for all the moments when I had held back my tears so I would not seem like too much.

Maybe letting them come was part of healing.

But crying did not automatically mean I had stayed on my own side. Even as the tears came, I kept asking what was wrong with me and why I could not control them.

Self-love in that room could have meant saying, That hurt me, instead of smiling and carrying on. If I could not say it, it could have meant leaving the room without pretending I was fine. Afterwards, it could have meant telling myself, Of course this hurt. It touched something much older, instead of treating my reaction as proof that something was wrong with me.

The ways I had learned to care for myself were still important. What I had not learned was how to stay on my own side when something brought that old belief back.

That left me with an even harder question.

My tears did not need an apology. But what about when an old wound was touched and I treated someone unfairly?

Could I stay on my own side and still take responsibility for what I had done?

That was where self-love began to ask more of me.

To be continued.