It turns out that being loved is a skill that you have to develop. It’s not a thing you will naturally respond well to if you didn’t learn that skill as a kid.

It can be terrifying.

Being loved, to me, brings up all this stuff.

“Don’t they know I am not to be loved?”

“I’m going to let them down.”

“What obligations does this put on me that I don’t see?”

“I don’t feel safe in this moment.”

What I finally get is that I can ignore those. They’re just feels.

My challenge now is to accept the love I am offered without sabotaging it out of a desire to redirect it into a known channel that feels predictable and “safe”.

Love is terrifying, and the stakes are another person’s life. It feels like a high risk situation with largely externalized costs and ambiguous operating instructions.

And the more you love the person who loves you the more you want to spare them the pain of loving you.

But if you learn to love yourself, all of this changes. Slowly.

You learn that you can, in fact, be the object of love. Once you love you, it’s safer for others to as well.

But I don’t know how to learn that without learning to love yourself first.

Learning to love myself has been really really hard. It would have been impossible without the autism and adhd diagnoses, I suspect.

But it’s so necessary. If you don’t love you, then you’re just kinda duct-taper passively to your own life.

That’s why I do this outreach.