Love Thyself (Eventually)
The years I thought I was cooler without me (Part 1)
Chapter 11
The art of self-loathing (And other childhood talents)
There was a time I thought self-love was embarrassing. Em-ba-rra-ssing. Yes.
Like a soft-lipped affirmation you whisper to yourself in a mirror and immediately regret. Like a neon sign screaming "I’m trying" in a world that only claps for those who look like they’re not.
Back then, I wore cynicism like a second skin, sharp, polished, and proudly self-deprecating.
If I could pre-reject myself, no one else could beat me to it. Loving yourself meant you didn’t know better. It meant you hadn’t looked closely enough. Hadn’t seen the rot. Hadn’t taken inventory of all the ways you weren’t enough. Not clever enough, not kind enough, not light enough, not tough enough. Not enough enough.
And so I built a whole identity around my dislike for myself. I called it realism. I called it grit.
But between you and me now, it was just grief, dressed as personality.
I used to worship the broken ones. The doomed poets. The melancholic girls scribbling survival into the margins. The boys who built whole identities out of ellipses and emotional riddles. The surrealists. The outsiders. The depressed and disillusioned, the ones who mistook pain for proof of depth.
Sylvia Plath, with her oven. Anne Sexton, with her cigarettes and confessions. Charles Bukowski, bleeding bravado. Jim Morrison, unraveling in his own lyrics. Poe, with a pen dipped in madness…
I thought they had found the secret door, the one where pain made you brilliant. Where suffering meant you were paying your dues to genius. And I wanted in.
I believed if I bled beautifully, I, too, would matter. So I studied their wounds and tried to write mine prettier. I didn’t want healing. I wanted to be misunderstood, and applauded for the ache.
So I romanticized the pain. I memorized it. I made it mine. Mentally. Emotionally. Physically. I thought: If I bleed well enough on the page, maybe it will count. Maybe I will count.
I wrote poems that read like open wounds.
It wasn’t healing. It was performance. Because sometimes, when a young woman learns to hate herself out loud, but wraps it in beauty, people don’t call it pain. They call it talent.
And the world? It didn’t fully understand. But it didn’t turn away either. They applauded the aesthetic.
It’s easier to praise the art than to ask if the artist is okay.
The curse of the capable: How I thought productivity would save me
There’s a special kind of burnout reserved for the girl who never asked for help. The one who always knew what to say. The one who held her own grief in one hand and your crisis in the other, smiling, translating, softening the blow.
They called it strength. They said I was “so mature for my age.” What they meant was: “You’re really good at abandoning yourself quietly.”
When you grow up too early, self-love sounds like a luxury.
A self-indulgent act reserved for people with time. With options. With softness.
I thought I was exempt. Self-love? That’s for people who had someone else to catch the fire while they rested. I was the one doing the catching. I became fluent in everyone else’s pain and illiterate in my own.
So I built my identity around usefulness. If I could just fix enough, prevent enough, achieve enough, I’d be safe.
Not loved. Not free. Safe.
That’s the thing no one tells you about being the hyper-capable one: You don’t get rescued. You don’t even get asked if you need anything. You get praised for making it look easy.
And over time, your nervous system learns the pattern. The amygdala, the brain’s built-in alarm system, starts associating being seen, needing help, slowing down with danger. Your heart rate spikes when you consider asking for support.
Your body rebels at the idea of rest. Because stillness feels like exposure. And exposure feels like threat.
Especially when you’re wired like me. Highly Sensitive. Emotionally permeable. You don’t feel your own feelings, you feel everyone else’s, too. And in a world that rewards numbness, empathy becomes a liability.
So you become efficient. You learn to read rooms faster than you read books. You shape-shift. You soothe. You succeed. You disappear. You believe your worth is in what you prevent. Not in what you are.
“Doing too much is a trauma response. If you learned to be lovable by being useful, you will think your worth lives in what you do, not who you are.”—Dr. Thema Bryant.
And that belief calcifies into your decisions. You don’t pick what you love, you pick what will make you useful. You stay where you’re needed, not where you’re nourished.
You start confusing exhaustion with purpose. And the worst part? No one tells you to stop. Because your ability to cope looks like a gift. You’re the one holding it all together, and most people don’t question the glue.
“When we’re children, we will abandon ourselves to keep the connection with our caregivers. As adults, we continue abandoning ourselves, only now, we call it productivity.”—Dr. Gabor Maté.
But behind every overachiever is a child who learned their needs were too loud.
Too inconvenient. Too much. And behind that child?
A nervous system still waiting for permission to rest.
Cracked mirrors & crowded rooms
By the time I was done performing self-hatred as personality and overachievement as identity, I didn’t think I had a self-worth problem. I just thought I had standards. Refinement. Taste.
I liked complexity. I liked restraint. I liked sitting at the back of the room dissecting the energy like a forensic empath.
I liked people who didn’t like me back. Because somewhere along the way, I inherited a belief: Love you had to earn was worth more than love that came freely.
And if you grew up anticipating the moods of those who were supposed to care for you, parents, teachers, gods, you know what I mean.
You don’t call it pain. You call it “emotional intelligence.” You call it “reading the room.”
You mistake hyper-vigilance for maturity. Sensitivity for wisdom. Self-abandonment for charm. You become fluent in other people’s needs. You pre-blame yourself to lessen the sting. You beat shame to the punch by carrying it like a name badge.
And that’s what chronic emotional over-functioning looks like.
Psychologists call this fawning, a trauma response rooted in the need to appease or please as a way to avoid harm. In highly sensitive people (HSPs), it often looks like attunement turned toxic: you feel everything, so you start muting yourself to protect others from your emotional volume.
But no one ever taught us that empathy without boundaries is just self-erasure in a prettier dress. So we build identities around being likable. We become the helper. The overachiever. The comic. The peacemaker. The one who can always take it.
And we call that personality.
But really?
It’s the prison we built to survive.
“I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make others happy…because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless.” — Robin Williams
What they don’t tell you about being the most emotionally fluent one in the room is that you get to hold everyone else’s feelings, except your own. You become a translator for everyone else’s discomfort, hoping someone will finally translate yours.
You think you’re building intimacy. But what you’re really building is invisibility. You don’t become smaller to be understood. You become smaller to be tolerated. And when that doesn’t work? You don’t get mad. You just blame yourself for not disappearing better.
That’s what cracked mirrors do: they reflect only the parts you’ve been trained to love. The useful parts. The palatable ones. The ones that won’t get you exiled from someone else’s comfort. And then one day, maybe, if you’re lucky, you meet a different mirror.
A therapist. A poem. A heartbreak. A migraine of meaninglessness so loud you finally cancel your calendar. And it shows you: You were never broken. You were breaking yourself into bite-sized versions to survive.
You flinch. You weep. You grieve the years you mistook distortion for truth.
And then…you begin. From scratch.
Because healing, my friend, isn’t a glow-up. It’s not aesthetic. It’s not your morning routine on a Pinterest board.
Healing is what happens when you stand in the wreckage of your performance, and choose not to turn away. When you meet your full self in a mirror that doesn’t demand you earn your reflection.
It’s the sacred, boring, radical act of saying:
I am not an apology.
I am not an adjustment.
I am not your edit.
I am not the idealized version you hoped I’d be.
I’m me.
And I’m done hiding.
The homecoming
The first time I heard someone say, “You have to love yourself before anyone else can”, I wanted to roll my eyes so hard they’d fall out and file a complaint.
Love yourself? With what time? What blueprint? What evidence?
I hadn’t even figured out how to tolerate myself yet.
I knew how to self-correct. How to shape-shift. How to predict moods, perform approval, and outrun shame with productivity. But love?
It sounded like a word reserved for other people. People with fewer tabs open in their brain. People who didn’t need a three-day recovery after a five-minute vulnerable conversation. People who weren’t still haunted by things they said at age nine.
No one teaches you how to come home to yourself. Especially when the place you came from mistook survival for love, and silence for peace. When “home” meant tension in the air and tiptoes became second nature. When the people meant to model safety were still searching for it themselves. Ah, generational cycles, that beautiful, brutal loop we didn’t ask for, but somehow still carry in our bones.
You grow up scanning, not settling. Proving, not pausing. Blending, not belonging.
So when someone says “just love yourself,” it doesn’t feel like advice. It feels like an inside joke I wasn’t invited to.
And I proceeded doing what high-functioning heartbreakers do:
I turned love into a skillset. I made healing a to-do list. I turned pain into performance art. Because if it looked like growth, maybe no one would question the ache. And somewhere between the applause and the over-functioning, I forgot that love wasn’t supposed to be earned. It was supposed to be felt.
So much later in life I learned though that you don’t fall in love with yourself like a lightning strike. It’s not fireworks. It’s the slow, sacred act of returning.
You fall in love with the way your voice no longer trembles when you speak your truth. The way your spine straightens in rooms that once made you shrink. With the quiet grace of offering yourself a soft place to land, no conditions, no proof. You fall in love not because you’ve finally gotten it “right” but because you’ve stopped auditioning for your own worth.
You stop treating self-love like a trophy and start recognizing it as ancestral, something sacred that’s always belonged to you.
As Brianna Wiest writes:
“You fall in love with yourself when the child inside looks at the adult you are now and sees the ease of their own approval.”
That moment? When your inner child unclenches. When she sees you choosing softness over shame, presence over punishment, that’s a homecoming.
You don’t arrive at self-worth. You come back to it. On the days you least feel like you deserve to.
Like the first exhale after a lifetime of holding your breath.
It’s not a switch. It’s a muscle you rebuild. A song you relearn by humming the parts you forgot. It’s the slow return to something holy, something you were born with, but taught to forget. Because when you arrived here, you didn’t question your worth. It pulsed in your breath. It shimmered in your stillness. It lived in you like light.
Life later taught you to mask. To earn your place. To perform. To apologize for your too-muchness. To earn what should have been yours without proof. You grew up believing that love was something to achieve, instead of something you already were.
But the truth doesn’t vanish just because we were taught to forget it.
It lingers. Quiet. Patient. Waiting for the moment we’re brave enough to come looking.
If this first part felt tender, it’s because we’re not editing the ache out of the story. We’re stitching new language where silence used to be. We’re becoming the love story no one else wrote for us.
So now, I come back to myself not with noise, but with stillness.
Not with grand declarations, but with the quiet consistency of showing up.
I don’t try to fix her.
I sit beside her.
I let her spill. I let her tremble. I let her exist without earning it.
And slowly, miraculously, she stops flinching when I reach for her.
She starts believing the warmth isn’t a trick.
That the softness won’t turn sharp.
Every time I choose presence over punishment, gentleness over guilt,
I rebuild the blueprint she never got.
That’s what healing really is:
Proving to the girl inside you, that this time, love is staying.
That this time, you’re staying.
What’s next?
How you forgive the girl who thought she had to hate herself just to be seen? And how you write new sentences that make staying alive worth it.
We’ll step into the quiet corners where shame lives in the body, stored not just in memory, but in muscle. We’ll talk about what it means to reparent the version of you who never felt chosen, never felt safe to just be. We’ll build gentle rituals to bring you back to yourself, daily acts of return, not repair.
And I’ll share the tools I wish someone had handed me the first time I was told I was “too much,” and believed it.
Until then?
Wrap yourself in the gentleness no one gave you soon enough.
Not because you’ve earned it.
But because you exist.
And existence is enough.
“You don’t have to become better. Just truer.” — Jamie Varon
→If you’ve ever flinched at the idea of loving yourself because you thought it was cheesy, weak, or unearned, I’d love to hear your story. Comment below.
🎁 I have a free gift for you! The Resonant Story Vault.
Templates. Tools. Emotional Hooks. Storytelling that sticks.
If you’ve ever sat in front of a blinking cursor wondering how to start, how to not sound fake, how to say something that matters.
This vault is for you.
The Resonant Story Vault is your quiet powerhouse of story-driven tools to help you write with emotional fluency, psychological depth, and unapologetic clarity.
Inside, you’ll find:
✍️ Fill-in-the-blank story templates for moments that matter
🎯 Emotional hooks & openers designed to stop the scroll and start connection
🧠 Reflection prompts to pull truth out of hiding (and into your words)
🧰 CTA & closer swipe file for posts, newsletters, or talks
🧬 The Storytelling Framework Cheatsheet to keep your writing grounded, human, and resonant
This is for anyone tired of sounding like everyone else.
Anyone who wants their words to feel like a heartbeat, not a brand strategy.
Start saying what you really mean.
Start stories that stay with people. Emotional fluency is the new leadership language.
👉Download The Resonant Story Vault here.
This is my first attempt at creating something like this, raw, honest, and made with you in mind. If it resonates (or even if it doesn’t), I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Your feedback will help me make it even better.
Every Monday at 12:30 CEST, the Glorious Fail will meet you where you are, ready to disrupt, challenge, and rebrand failure.
There are plenty of ways to support the Glorious Fail:
→ If this landed a little too close to home, give it a like.
→ If you have thoughts, feedback, or just want to say hi, drop a comment.
→ And If it cracked something open and want to spread the word, hit that restack button below.
The Glorious Fail is just getting started, and every interaction brings it to life. Let’s fail forward, together. Rebrand failure. Reclaim the story. Rewrite what comes next.
This is so relatable and profound. Thank you so much.
"You start confusing exhaustion with purpose. And the worst part? No one tells you to stop. Because your ability to cope looks like a gift." needed this today. truly 🤍