How am I to learn to love others well? By learning to love myself well. I don’t have a clue where to begin. There’s a serious lack of viable role models in the area of self-love. I certainly saw no examples of love during my childhood. All I witnessed was fear, scarcity, anger, and grief. As an adult, I see insecurity and defensiveness in most other eyes. We’re so scared, and we live in a culture that promotes armor and pretending. At the mature age of seventeen, I wrote a poem with the line: “You’re only one person who plays so many parts, yet not even the greatest obtains multiple hearts.” It’s good to have roles because our relationships differ situationally, but we only have one heart. I need to be of one heart. I need to define who I am in order to love who I am. I don’t need to find myself; I need to be myself. I need to accept the parts of myself that I can’t change. I need to recognize what those parts are and choose to love them as parts of me.