Only My Own

Photo by Christopher Sardegna on Unsplash

By Erin Deborah Waks

I thought I knew myself so well that I couldn’t possibly be wrong about any of my own emotions. But this week I cried down the phone to someone I love, telling them they made me question their feelings for me. So certain was I of my own ‘self-understanding’ and love of ‘asking for what I need’ that I acted out of fear and insecurity. Desperate not to feel so uneasy, I asked for reassurance of something that in my heart I know. 

When I was younger, I believed I wasn’t good enough. That I had to be ‘perfect’ to be worthy of love, that if I messed up no one would forgive me, that my life was all about catering to others. I thought I couldn’t handle being abandoned, so I preemptively behaved perfectly so that could never happen. I felt like the delicate balance I had found in my life was so unstable that a single breeze could knock it all over. And I thought I worked through that.

So when, this week, I felt sad, lonely, disconnected and unloved, I assumed it was an outward issue. Desperate not to question my worth, I jumped to blame someone I love for causing a shaken confidence in myself. I did something that wasn’t perfect, that was messy and flawed. I acted rashly, asking them to love me more, to love me harder, to love me louder.

Then I realised that I wasn’t talking to them. Because that love is quietly but clearly visible in everything. In little things, like knowing how I like my coffee, have an aversion to weighing myself, or that I sometimes want to be held for just a moment longer. 

I was talking to myself. 

This person to whom I cried is a new one in my life. Meeting them gave me something new to lose, a new feeling that, if taken away, could maybe one day break my heart. That new belief messed with my carefully curated balance of being truly at peace with myself. All of a sudden I went from my perfectly practised routine of being in love with life to having something new, something that made my life, in some ways, even better than it was before. And I became momentarily preoccupied with it disappearing, clutching on harder. 

That scared me, and made me crave certainty from the source of that affection. But no amount of reassurance from someone else can quiet the noise in your mind when you feel like things are slipping out of control. No words of affirmation from any other person can make you feel loved if it doesn’t come from within you. 

Only my own.