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.

Is there life beyond mere survival? Yes, there is more to life than eating, drinking, and enjoying the work of your hands. In fact, I’ve come to believe that the whole reason we’re even here in the first place is to learn to love each other well. Our brains get programmed poorly during childhood, often with the best of intentions. We learn to fear people who are different from us. We learn to use physical violence, intellectual reasoning, or emotional manipulation to get what we want. We learn to crush the other guy because the only way for us to win is for someone else to fail. We learn to hate the people who don’t follow our rules or conform to our standards. It is easier to live in a world of absolutes, of black and white, of right and wrong. It’s easier, but it’s not more loving. Loving is painful. Loving is costly. Love is giving someone else the larger half of the last cookie. Love is accepting the larger half of the last cookie when it’s offered. Love is giving up the life of our dreams in order to be there for someone else, and love is letting go of a relationship we desire so our beloved can pursue the life of their dreams. Love is a complex paradox. Love is dangerous and alarming. Love is suffering and celebrating in our relationships with others. Love is binding and freedom. Love requires a lifetime to learn to love well. Love empties us, fills us, and flows through us as much as we’re able to allow. Love is not a sentimental, romantic notion. Love is a path of goodness and truth. Love hurts sometimes. Great love can be excruciating. And yet, learning to love well is rich and rewarding because love truly is always the more excellent way.

How do I restore my faith in other people? I don’t. It’s not wise for me to put my faith in other people. Other people are always going to disappoint me, abandon me, reject me, and let me down. What I need to do is to restore faith in myself. I’m going to disappoint myself and let myself down, too, but I won’t abandon myself again. I won’t reject myself anymore. I can learn new tools and practice my skills to take better care of myself. I can love myself. I can be good to myself, and I can believe in myself. Other people are going to love me, be good to me, and believe in me too, but I don’t have any control over when or whether they will. I do have control over when I show up for myself. I can put faith in my ability to choose life and to respond to life to the best of my ability. I don’t want to give anyone else the power over me to make me happy, to give me a sense of belonging, or to grant me the permission to express myself authentically. If I do give them that power, then I’m also giving them the power to deny me. I’m not willing to allow anyone to deny me the privilege of being true to myself anymore. Giving other people that type of control over me breeds fear, not faith.

Which self-destructive patterns learned in childhood are still affecting me now? No one cared about me, so I withdrew. I grew to prefer my own company. I enjoyed lying in the dark shed alone drawing pictures on the ceiling with a flashlight. I had fun playing barbies in our sauna of an attic, composing a pretend world the way I wanted it to be. I loved lining up my stuffed animals on the front porch and “teaching” them; it didn’t matter which subject, but it was usually math. And my idea of playing dress up was drawing “wrinkles” on my face with my mother’s eyebrow pencil, donning sunglasses and a shawl, and pretending to be an old lady hobbling around our front yard. I played solitaire. I colored. I dug in the dirt. I cut up cardboard boxes with our good steak knives, and I danced around the patio with a broom while sweeping. I’d spend an entire day daydreaming whenever it was my turn to clean the bathroom, which was nearly every Saturday since neither of my older sisters ever wanted to get stuck doing it. So, the bathroom never really actually did get clean, but I played in the water and scrubbed the bathtub. I got a sick sense of satisfaction watching the ring of dirty-kid grime peel away from the porcelain beneath the force of my wet rag doused with cleanser. Now, this fierce sense of independent striving prevents me from forming symbiotic relationships. I’ll do whatever I can do myself. Other people just get in the way. It’s not a healthy or productive approach to life, but it’s still habitual. As an introvert, I need to be intentional about making friends and including others at times as well as allowing myself enough alone time to recover. Therefore, I pray for the strength not to allow the fear of being on the receiving end of other people’s hurtful behaviors to control me or for the allure of solitude to draw me into an unhealthy pattern of solitude at the expense of interpersonal relationships.

I got lucky? I survived two near-fatal accidents. I nearly drowned a couple of times. I’ve endured decades of severe depression. I have no idea how I’m still alive; yet here I am. I feel like Lieutenant Dan in the movie Forrest Gump, saved from certain death only to be left crippled and without a leg to stand on. Eventually, he got lucky. The combination of a friend, a boat, and a raging storm restored his ability to feel alive again, to be alive again. I’ve had a series of friendships. I’ve gone through many raging storms. There have even been several boats in my life, and I’m not a boat person. I get seasick much too easily. And yet, I do believe there will come a time when I am able to look God square in the face and say with all sincerity, “Thank you for saving my life.” I don’t know when, and I don’t know how, but I have to believe I will be grateful to be alive someday. And when that day comes, I’ll be ready. I’ll walk across the grass with new strength in my stride due to a modern-day miracle, and I’ll possess a new ability to love, laugh, and enjoy my life.

Can I trust my own voice? If I can recognize my own voice. There are too many voices bouncing around in my head. I have a hard time distinguishing one voice from another within the cacophony. I’m so used to the voices telling me how stupid I am, how my opinion is not valued, how my presence is not wanted. I still experience the rejection viscerally regardless of what any particular voice is actually saying. Muscle memory tenses my body. Neurological memory flares, and my immune system goes on the attack, searching mercilessly for foreign invaders. My past is like the agony of a phantom limb. An amputation might prevent the disease from spreading farther into the body, but nothing can stop the brain from continuing to process the embedded pain. I have to fight back. The only other option is to enclose myself within a cocoon of apathy, which results in severe depression, and I’ve already wasted too much time in this self-imposed solitary confinement. So, instead, I talk to myself. I tell myself that it’s all going to be okay. I tell myself that my presence is appreciated and that my contributions are valued. I tell myself. I hear my voice. It’s not enough. There’s too much noise.

What is my motivation? Writing lists and making schedules for myself is what I keep coming back to every time I get determined to make something of myself, to do something with my life. It never works, not for very long anyway. This time has to be different. I have to really mean it. What makes it different for me this time is having the accountability of other people. I am not able to do life on my own. I need encouragement. I need appreciation. I need connection with other people. I need to feel like what I do matters, like I’m contributing something to the world, like I’m making a difference. It’s so easy for me to fall into isolation. I can be invisible. I can spend my days curled up on the couch eating protein bars and not exercising or showering for days or even weeks on end, and no one else would care or even notice. If I want other people to notice and care about what I do, where I go, how I spend my days, then I need to reach out and care about them. I need to ask how they’re doing. I need to pay attention to whether they leave the house, exercise, or shower. Caring about other people is my motivation; that’s what makes all the difference.

Where am I? It’s not as simple and straight-forward of a question as it may seem. I know where I am geographically, more or less, and when there’s doubt, my phone can tell me. But my phone doesn’t know where I am mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. Maybe there’s an app for that, but if there is, I don’t want to know about it. I want to be able to decide for myself where I am, where I’m going, and where I want to be. I realized a long time ago that I don’t usually get to go where I want to go geographically. I go wherever my life happens to take me. But on the inside. I always get to decide where I’m going to go on the inside. On the inside, my heart has been lost at sea. I first lost my bearings when my father chose to leave our family. Then, a decade later, I jumped overboard when I was told that I didn’t get to have the life I wanted to have. My dream died and was buried at sea. I chased after it anyway. I’ve been adrift ever since, following the hero’s journey in my personal Odyssey: cyclopes, sirens, lotus land, and all.

Where is my focus? As someone who’s suffered with ADHD her whole life, my mind seems to oscillate between hyper-focus and dissociation, with various levels of distractibility in between. Where the mind goes, the rest of me follows. I journey into the depths of unknotting a necklace chain with a safety pin or fall into the “unspace” of zoning out. The question of where my mind has gone is often answered with the position of my physical body. When I’m frozen like a statue with a blank facial expression, my brain is taking a well-deserved break from its usual hypervigilance. I’m unconsciously tense all of the time, even while I’m deliberately trying to relax. If I’m horizontal or “reading,” I’m also fighting with myself to get on with my life, to make progress, to accomplish something. I need to learn to accept my disability, to quit resisting it so much. The struggle saps my strength, and I already don’t have energy to spare. I can still love and accept myself, even with a frustrating mental illness. I can still love and accept myself, even if I don’t make progress or accomplish anything. I can still love and accept myself and get on with my life.

How do I identify? Freedom sucks. In slavery, you do what you’re told. You don’t have to make any decisions. You go along to get along. One day after the next you follow the path that was decided for you until your rut hits a dead end, the grave. It’s simple. It’s predetermined. What you get stuck with could rock, or it could be a fate worse than death. Either way, it’s out of your hands. You can cling to hope that someday your circumstances will get better, but, ultimately, it’s out of your hands. You don’t have to be responsible for your life because you have no ability to respond otherwise. That’s how the first half of my life played out. I was a victim, a slave to my addiction. When other people in my life were hurt by my behaviors, it wasn’t my fault because I was just trying to survive. You can’t blame a person for trying to survive. But now, I’m free. I’m almost pissed at myself for working so hard to recover my freedom to choose because now I have to take responsibility for how I choose to identify. I’m no longer a slave to filling the role I was given by society, by my first education, by my family or origin. It’s up to me to define my identity now, who I am and who I want to become. And it hurts. It’s so hard because I know there will be people who don’t approve of the choices I make. I know that other people are going to get hurt by my decisions, and I have to own that. I have to take responsibility for the disaster I leave in my wake because I’ve chosen to take responsibility for the decisions that I make. I choose freedom. It sucks, and it hurts, and I’m scared, but it’s still better than the alternative.