That is a very hard question. I think mostly, we have to save ourselves. My experience has been that anyway. I totally will own that I so wanted to outsource that job to someone else. Mostly because I felt like I was unqualified for the position. Truly lacking what was required and needed and vital. But, as it turns, out, I have always had what I needed to save me. I just had to be willing to be still, quiet and patient. (I don’t do any of those things well, naturally - they have taken a monumental amount of work). But I have done it...repeatedly.
We live in a world today where the allure of salvation is peddled to us in ads, social media, romance novels, books, movies, film and tv. All day, every day. This idea that some great love is going to come along and rearrange our entire world is pervasive and petulant. We are so busy attempting to place ourselves in the way of finding love, that we forget that loving us is something that must begin with us. We have to love ourselves enough to save ourselves, first and mostly from ourselves, then our addictions, our pasts, our traumas, our damage and our pain. It is a lot of fucking work.
I did not end up on this self saving and loving path out of virtue or even intention. I am just here. I made one decision which led to the next decision and then the next and the next. It was not a plan, it was more of a desperate act, following a whole bunch of other desperate acts.
I never intended to be where I am. I didn’t even know this place was possible. I didn’t know that there was a place that was safe, warm, healing and comforting. I really didn’t know that place would be found inside myself, inside this twisted and gnarled human wreckage called me. I didn’t even know to look there, honestly.
But the universe has a way of calling you out. Causing you to pay attention. I mean, it also has a way of almost killing you in the process, but hey, whatever gets your attention, right?
So I didn’t end up on this road because of virtue but of necessity. And I wasted a great deal of time insisting that my own salvation could be found in someone else. And that fact has fucked me up more than anything, repeatedly. I didn’t want to do any more inner work, I wanted to have done what I did and be able to stop and fall in love and just be happy. But that is just not how it worked out at all.
And I will admit there is a significant amount of grief related to that for me. And some jealousy that I see so many other people seem to do it with impunity. Fall in love and have that life. What I have come to know is that I have been dreaming other people’s dreams and attempting to fit that onto me. It is kind of like attempting to make someone else’s well worn shoes fit your feet. Even if they are the right size, they will never be the right shape. And it will never feel comfortable.
It has been a process of trying on a lot of “shoes” and finding repeatedly they do not fit me. And I think I can finally own they didn’t fit because I was unfittable for a long time, still probably now too, but I feel like I become more fitting with each passing day. My main issue was that I didn’t want someone to get to know me...not the real me, I wanted you to fall in love with the fiction I was living. I wanted you to somehow never be shown who I really am but have you intuit who I really am, fall in love anyway and then work really fucking hard to get to know me, prying me away from my facade.
It never occurred to me that no one would want this job, this task. I felt and believed that somehow I was owed. I am not sure where that idea came from, I just know it was pervasive and persistent.
I thought that finding true love would save me. And you know what, it never did. And truthfully, searching for it in the manner I did only caused me to be more fucked up than ever.
I have come to a place in my life where I see that the salvation of me is always been a me thing. I mean, if I didn’t want the job why the fuck would anyone else? I had to come through all the trials, hardship, pain and lessons to find a place within myself that was worth all the effort true saving requires. And then I had to go through some more to arrive at a place where I was wiling to give up the perpetual dream that salvation lie in the next...whatever the fuck I thought would heal me.
Joke totally on me, it has been an inside job all along. No one else can save us. They can love us, they can support us, they can call us out, they can show up or not, but always it is our work to do. I have learned, the hard way (of course) that attempting to outsource an inside job that causes an untold amount of wreckage for me and others.
Love will save you, but it has to and must begin with you. I had to be surrendered to a place where I was reachable. I had to have the pain repeatedly and again, still over and over until I was finally in a place where I could see that my selection process for love and loving was fundamentally flawed. And until I course corrected that fatal error in judgment, I would repeatedly and continually end up in the same fucking nightmare relationship.
There are many things to love about me. I am kind, loving, helpful, smart, intuitive, funny. I am also terrified of getting close to you so I am perpetually engaged in some sort of hide and seek game with others that is exhausting to all who are even tempted to play. And I refused to accept that I did this for a long time. I wasn’t seeking to build an intimacy. I just wanted to feel good and you were supposed to deliver that to me, and I to you. I thought that intimacy was just sure to follow...even though there was no foundation laid for anything other than codependent toxicity to thrive.
I was not willing to see others as others. I saw them as extensions of some sort of reward/benefit plan that I wanted to participate in. Like a matching 401k or something, except I didn’t really want to contribute my part. And it has taken me a very long time to admit this. I wanted the income, but I didn’t want to have to work for it. I wanted the relationship but I wanted to be safe and risk nothing.
And that just isn’t the way it goes in life. Reward requires risk. And love requires vulnerability. And trust requires a familiarity that takes time, and effort and accountability. There is instant attraction, but love that is something that takes time.
And so too it is with loving yourself. And for me, the idea I had to remove in order to come to a loving place with me was to realize that I was going about loving all fucking wrong. I didn’t know how to do it. I got very lost along the way. I mistook need for love, want for love, lust for love. But of true love, I really knew almost nothing. I looked at love like it was salvation but that could be obtained without belief. Without faith. Without supplication and commitment.
I hated the idea that one must love themselves first. Fuck that! I wanted you to love me first and then I would love you and that would be enough. It isn’t. And I had to stop thinking that you were going to save me. Your love was going to be the thing that made me ok. It never did. In fact, my fucked up choices only made me worse.
So we have to love and save ourselves. It is the only way to really ever create a foundation where love of another can come to be. Because when you really love yourself and have done the work to save you from the demons that reside within, only then can you begin allowing only loving people in your life. For me, my life has been replete with takers. With people who did not want to do the work, paid lip service to doing the work or who wholesale lied about doing the work. And because I refused to attend to my own needs, insisting that YOU were supposed to take care of those, I made the same fucking mistake over and over and over again.
I love me. I save me. And once those things are done and ongoing, then, maybe I have a prayer of loving you and being courageous enough to allow you to love me.
Again, it is a lot of fucking work. But everything in this life that is worthwhile is something you have to fight for with all that you are. That is my experience. The easy things in this world, are not what matters. The things and people that come easy into my life, are not the ones that tend to remain. They are not the ones that cause me to grow and change and do the fucking work. The act of saving is heroic. But some of us learn very late in life that this whole salvation is a lifelong process that always begins and ends with us.
We save us. Every day in small and large ways. It is our job, our mission, our task. To love that which we know to be hard, difficult, damaged and often ugly. It is our job to love anyway. And in this love we find the courage to do the work to save that which is always has been ours to save. I save me, then I share with you how I did it , then you share that with others and there is a tidal wave of salvation that moves across the planet. I show you how. You show me how. And we do this very hard work, together, separately. And somehow in all the loving and saving, perhaps, a lasting loving connects abides. First with ourselves, and then, maybe with someone else.
I still don’t like it and wish that it were different. But I see how my commitment to the delusion that it can and should be otherwise has only created more pain, trauma and loss. Again, still.
But now I see there is another way...a different path whose ending is not assured but is possible. And it all begins and ends with me, being accountable to myself to make my life the happiest, well lived and loved life there ever was. And that is something totally worth saving...
Comments