When you have had to fight your way to finding yourself, crawled your way out of a depression, out of self-hatred, shame, guilt, and not knowing your worth, accepting an ideology that requires you to say there’s something fundamentally and inherently wrong with you, and that only this ideology can fix it, sounds incredibly convenient for someone and just feels wrong.
I can’t reconcile the two.
I spent an enormous amount of time figuring out who I am at my core and learning to love what I found there. To feel ok about denouncing that person, to feel ok with saying I need to be saved from myself, the same self that contains the capacity to love, didn’t feel right to me.
I recognize there is also a capacity for negative feelings. But once I decided on love, once I saw the humanity in myself, and accepted it all, I was able to deal with those feelings from a more logical and loving place.
In short, by learning to love myself, I learned to love better.
I try to be accepting of different ideas and beliefs because, in the end, none of us know the truth about any of it. We think we do, some think so more strongly than others, but to my knowledge, there is no proof either way about anything, not really.
I may think some ideas are silly and some make more sense, but ultimately, it’s still just my opinion. Most “truths” are based on personal experience and therefore also fall under the category of opinion.
My belief is in self-love and in that love, I found answers to questions of moral or “right” living, and a way of moving and living in the world that isn’t so contingent on other humans’ ideas.
So when I am met with an idea, belief, or opinion that requires people to criticize, judge, and detest their innermost selves, I have a hard time keeping myself from becoming critical and judgmental of their position—a conundrum.
In short, I believe we all have challenges we face in our inner worlds, but these challenges are not flaws and do not require retribution but reflection.
People believe they are unlovable. That they need a deity or outside source to tell them that they are loved. But I believe if they would look inside and find their self-love, they may be able to make more sense of it all.
They say they love (insert your favorite god that requires self-sacrifice) because he first loved them. But I wonder, is it true that we only love in reciprocation? Is that what humans do? Maybe. I can think of examples of when people loved me, and then I, in turn, loved them. I’ll have to think about examples of where I loved first.
I suppose that whoever came up with the idea of a deity that required abandonment of the self knew it was a good way to get humans to agree that they loved said deity, because we love whatever loves us first, at least most of the time, for a while.
But what if we loved ourselves first? Would our love not just multiply? We love ourselves, then our selves love us back. Cut out the middlemen.
I just can’t reconcile why we would be expected to walk around and claim that we are bad, that we are wrong, we’re dirty, and vile. Inherently flawed and in need of saving. This is not to say that I believe humans are not capable of being dirty and vile, because there are bad, evil, and unjust things that people do. But I believe the dirty, evil, and vile are born out of a lack of love.
Claiming that you have to believe a certain way or adopt certain beliefs to possess kindness, love, morality, and a sense of justice is ridiculous and a horrible way to view ourselves and our fellow humans. What a grim life view.
I do not believe that you need a certain set of beliefs to be a good person, to have good qualities, to have morality. This tends to cause me problems with some people because they can’t quite understand how one could choose to do right without the threat of punishment. I choose right for the sake of doing right.
I have found love for myself and, therefore, love for others. Sometimes, my self-love is hard to hold onto. At times, I’m clawing, grasping, doing whatever I can to hang onto it, but it is there, and through my personal journey, I know that it is the only thing that will keep me going in a real way.
It was not easy, but I found it. And if I can love myself, I can love others.
If you love yourself, I believe it becomes more difficult to harm others. How can you hurt others when you recognize the humanity you both share and still choose love? If you do this and still choose to harm others, then I guess I would have to concede that inherently bad people exist. Maybe they do, they probably do, I don’t know. All I know at this point is what has worked for me and what feels true to me.
I think that looking at people as fundamentally and inherently bad is a harmful and erroneous way of looking at humanity as a whole.
I think there are good people. I think there are more good people than bad people. I think circumstances can make some people present as “bad,” but most importantly, I don’t think we were all born bad or that we need saving from anything other than ourselves, which we can do ourselves. The only way I have found to do that is to do the inner work required. First, get to know yourself, and then ultimately realize you are worthy of love because you possess love. Then, you can freely feel and give that love to yourself any time you need it.
Written 11.20.24 Revised 7.6.26
