This song lyric blew me away a couple days ago, and I'm not done thinking about it. I think it is the key to my low self-worth. I have a tendency to fall in love easily and deeply. I crush on a guy, and I immediately imagine our joint future. I wonder if he is The One, I smile into the middle distance, I text and delete and look through pictures.
I put all my love inside someone else.
And when they reject me, it's easy to hate myself. Because if this guy who I think is so awesome does not think the same of me, then obviously there's something wrong with me. I'm unloveable. I'm disgusting. I'm too neurotic, too passionate, too different, too tall, too opinionated, too ugly.
It's easy to hate myself when all my love is inside someone else.
So what needs to change? I need to keep some love for myself. I need to rest in the assurance that I like who I am, even if some guy doesn't. If I give someone else the power to decide if I have worth or not, I will always be disappointed. People, in all their glory and folly, will always disappoint. Even if someday a guy I like feels the same way about me, there will still be days when he says something unkind or unthinking, and I'll be back in the same pit of self-doubt.
I need to trust my own judgment.
(I know some readers will think, you should find your identity in God! Which is true. Of course I do not fully understand God's love, but most of me thinks, "Well of course God loves me. I want people and cute boys to love me just as much!" But yes, I can always learn to lean more fully on God's opinion of me.)
"Well of course God loves me. I want people and cute boys to love me just as much!" From an old man who has been around and seen a lot, some advice: you need to love yourself just as much as God does. Drawing your identity and self-worth from someone else's opinion (or love) of you just leads to frustration. If nobody loves me, then I must be unlovable...NOT.
ReplyDeleteCould it be that fellows are sensing that you are placing the responsibility for your self-worth on them, and that burden scares them? It would scare me. Men are real wimps on that score.
You are very attractive, very smart, erudite and a great writer. What's not to love?
I think my problems usually come down to pride, actually. I would be more willing to believe that I turn guys off by thinking too well of myself than by thinking too little. But I don't talk about my pride on here all that often, because, uh, even with all my talk about honesty, I still don't want the interwebs to see all of me.
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