from twitter – copied a thread from @nanpansky
under the sign of unloveability, you maintain a conditional paradise: “if only i could have done xyz, i would feel good”
cut 2 adulthood: you are ambivalent about giving & receiving love bc for years it involved u believing urself to be a hopeless piece of shit
u believe there is a mysterious correlation between how much of a piece of shit u believe urself to be & how much love u might one day get
u think being shit is preventing others from loving u, but also hope that ur excellent grasp of how shit u are will persuade them to love u
bc u interpreted the bad love u got way back when as an absence of love resulting from ur badness, ur idea of love is “feeling 100% great!!”
in reality love is not feeling 100% great, it is like, having sex and being cute and getting mad and being boring and making mistakes, etc
when ur partner points out that u are angry or bored or mistaken, ur inner google-translate renders it as “you are bad and i dont love you”
all conflicts become, to you, existential crises about whether or not u are unloveable (i.e. in ur mind, bad) or loveable (good)
once ur mother or carer was the centre of the world & her love was ur survival and u had to believe in it bc u thought otherwise u wd die
life isnt long enough for these things to go away completely so they stick around & sometimes someone loves u enough that u can look at them
they are smaller than light, the earliest memories, and u can only see them by the traces they leave on the years draped over them
the One Good Love is a baby fantasy, it will never come, but if u work on forgiving urself u will have some complicated real love
for “unloveable” ppl, real love can be hard bc it’s not the perfect love u thought u wd get one day, bc being loved reminds u of old pains
real love is hard bc ur preoccupation w ur own goodness/badness can blind u to actual relationship issues or make them hard to discern
real love is hard bc people are not your mother: if they dont love u right or u dont love them right, they can leave u, u can leave them
if u approach rships as if they have same stakes as mother/baby, u will b so preoccupied w ur own survival that ur rship might not survive
traversing the old fear of being unloveable & abandoned & therefore dying might involve the painful learning that u can be left & not die
real love, all its potential to fail or hurt, is so scary, but the reward along the way is some kind of crazy beautiful image of integrity
all your parts are yours, all the beloved’s parts are theirs, u can gather up ur amputated parts, the abject detritus, all belongs to all
these self-inflicted injuries were not love’s price, it doesn’t have one, u can’t trade parts of urself for it, u can’t bargain with it
the reward for not hating urself will not be that the past changes or ur prince comes. the reward for not hating urself is not hating urself