The Practical Value of Loving Oneself First
RuPaul’s closing prayer for each episode (“If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else”) is one of those annoying cultural memes that is not only true, but over time becomes truer in new, expanded ways.
For anyone not versed in the emotional vocab of earnest young People On The Internet, the phrase “self-love” feels vain, up-yourself and faintly feminine.
“She pure loves herself, so she does.”
Reframed not as cupcake dopamine but steady hands on the wheel, “self-love” might be better thought of as a step to the side to view oneself from an angle, as an object worthy of care, and adopting the gentle, detached, faintly amused tone a parent might take with a child who doesn’t know any better.
Put it down little chicken, you’re going to hurt yourself.
It is the fortifying of internal resources so when other people are in need you actually have something to draw upon.
Investment requires capital.
A compromised capacity to generate love for ourselves leads to seeking it in external sources, exploiting them like a capitalist strip-mining a copper mountain.
Done right, loving is the technically-impossible practice of learning to see the other person as they are.
But lack of self-love distorts our image of the Other, making them out-sized, over-weening, dangerously centralised. They become gorged upon, depleted, responsible for outsourced duties of care that they never signed up for in the first place.
They are turned from a human person — a unique weirdo on loan from the universe — into a guarantor, a confirmation of something you would like very much to be true (about yourself).
A person with a healthy relationship with themselves looks at their partner and thinks “how is this person hurting, and how can I help them feel secure and seen?”.
A person with an unhealthy relationship with themselves looks at their partner and thinks “how can I get her to not leave?”.
This person becomes a rogue agent inside their own relationship: their interest is not in the work of honoring the Other, or the shared space between, but in doing whatever is necessary in that moment to keep the wheels turning so there is no disruption in supply.
A short-term strategy born from fear cannot sustain the project. Apart from anything else, lack of self-love severely diminishes fuckability.
Dealers don’t respect junkies.
