I keep seeing some variation of “stop telling people they can’t find love until they love themselves,” and while I get the sentiment, I think maybe we need to clarify what love is and isn’t.

Love is an action, not a feeling. Love is in whatever you do toward the growth and healing of a person. The inability to act toward growth and healing is not the same thing as depression or mental health struggles (even if these struggles make those actions harder to recognize).

I think it’s far more ableist to imply that those with mental health struggles can’t love themselves than to argue you can’t receive support along your growth and healing journey if you aren’t even on it, which is self-evident.

I had a “friend” once who used to say shit like this to me all the time. She would also argue that boundaries in relationships were “colonial ideas” and therapy was individualistic.

What she meant was that she should always be seen as justified in acting from her traumas, and everyone else would always be wrong if they held her accountable not to.

She didn’t love herself, but it wasn’t her fault, so she had no responsibility to it. It was my fault if I let that be a dealbreaker because I wasn’t centering her struggles.

She was a liar, a manipulator, and one of the biggest violators in all of my life. And that was directly tied to her inability to act toward healing herself (her inability to love herself).

I had to be just as miserable as her in order for our relationship to work. I had to listen to her talk shit about therapy when I tried to celebrate some breakthrough it brought me.

I had to listen to her talk shit about herself—my supposed friend—all the time, and I became the bad person if I didn’t want to—if I had any loyalty or urge to defend her. This was reflected in how she treated my other friends, & treated my loyalty toward & defenses of them too.

None of us live in a vacuum. An inability to value your own healing because of your traumas is inextricable from the inability to value the healing of another person who has experienced similar traumas.

I’m not saying that everyone who finds it difficult to love themselves is as soul-sucking as she was, I’m just saying that finding it difficult to love is no excuse not to do the work. And that’s true whether the person being loved is you or someone else.

Love takes work, and if you can’t find yourself worthy of that, I don’t think there’s any way you could find me worth it. Even if you could, as half of it, you could never fully find *the relationship itself* worth it.

But I am worth the work of love, and so are all of my relationships, which means I’m no longer offering love to those who can’t receive it.

That doesn’t mean my anxiety-ridden ass doesn’t struggle with loving myself & others. It means exactly the opposite: I’ll struggle with love for the rest of my life, because that’s what relationships require.

And it doesn’t mean I’m always testing my friends/lovers or expecting they’ll be able to receive love all the time. It just means that once you show me you can’t receive love—are unwilling to consistently—I’m out. There’s no way anyone will ever make me feel bad about that again.