How (Not) to Love Yourself
Why is it so hard to love myself?
It's July and hotter than hell outside. Hotter still in this van. I’m in the front seat, a bag of flea market finds resting on the floor beside my dusty feet. I usually go to the Iola Car Show with my dad. This year I went with a boyfriend. It’s his cousin—some puny little creep I just met this morning—in the backseat talking about women. The ones who want him. The ones he’s had. The ones he’d never, ever take home—like me. What are you thinking? he asks his cousin—my boyfriend—as if I can’t hear him, as if I’m not sitting in the front seat. As if it doesn’t matter that I am. He spends the next half hour explaining all the ways I don’t measure up. My boyfriend lets him—I let him—completely and utterly tear me apart.
I’m invisible. I’m not worth seeing. I am nothing. I am no one.
I’m bawling in the passenger seat of my car in a gas station somewhere between Milwaukee and home. It’s late. Fourteen hundred miles away, a life I desperately clung to has disintegrated, the illusion of love finally shattered by a bottle of red nail polish and another woman’s shorts in a bedside table. I want to drive so I don’t have to spend three hours writhing in the pain of this loss. I need to drive to be OK. She won’t let me. She says it’s because I’m hysterical, but I’m hysterical because I can’t believe she won’t give me the keys to my own car. I’m hysterical because my heart is broken, and while I’m feeling as low as I’ve ever felt in my life, she says they hate me. They all hate me. Everyone that is supposed to love me doesn’t. The road behind me is gone and I have no future. Nowhere to go. I’m hysterical because she’s right…and I can’t do anything about it.
I am worthless. I am a piece of unloved shit.
I don’t know why I care what he says. We don’t agree on anything. Any-fucking-thing. Most of the time I don’t even argue with him because there’s no point. So why do I care? Why am I listening? No one else says a word because he does all the talking. He tells me I’m useless. He says I’ve never had to take care of myself and he doesn’t think I could if I ever had to try. No one agrees, but no one steps in to defend me either. These are my friends, my people. We’ve been drinking and now I’m crying and I’m angry that I let this happen and even angrier that I might believe him.
I am the scum of the earth. Useless. A waste of space.
I am the problem.
I’ve always been the problem.
I was the problem when I was the kid no one wanted around. I was the problem when I chased on the heels of kids who didn’t want to be my friend. I was the problem when my mother got in trouble and I had to join, leave, then rejoin the other side of a family that was growing while I was gone. I was the sidenote, the baggage left in the living room to fend for myself while my mother spent time with her boyfriends behind closed doors. I was the problem when I acted out because I was always being sent places I didn’t want to go. I was the needy kid, the selfish kid, the brat who didn’t listen, the quiet girl in school, the Underdog no one wanted, the moody teenager that went on too many crying jags, the sister who tortured her siblings to relieve her own pain, the daughter who needed more help than she would ever get—than they ever knew I needed—the beast, the burden, the one tearing an otherwise perfect family apart. Did anyone ever love me enough?
How the hell can I?