Loving Myself

I'm going through a dark time in my life. I am in Limbo. I have come home from college for a few weeks and I don't feel like I belong here. A couple times last week, I went back up to Kalamazoo for different reasons and visited my apartment, but there seemed no reason to be there. My spiritual computer has crashed the rest of the way. I feel restless and uneasy about the future, even hopeless at times. My heart has felt extremely heavy lately, emotionally. It almost physically hurts sometimes.

But I believe God has brought me to this emotional state for a very good reason. Struggling with loneliness and being depressed has caused me to confront an issue that has plagued me all my life. I have never been happy being me. I have never loved myself. Sure, I've been happy, I've felt the love of God and the love of friends and family in my life, but underneath it all, I have never really felt worthy of being alive or receiving love from others.

I was reading Blue Like Jazz again a few nights ago before bed, and I read the chapter on loving yourself. I knew a few days beforehand that I needed to read that chapter in order to directly confront this issue, but I patiently read through the preceding chapters. As it turns out, and as I've often experienced in the past, the night I read that part of Blue Like Jazz was exactly when I needed to.

Donald Miller talked about how all his relationships with girls never went well because he could not receive their love, he could not believe that anyone would love him. He didn't like himself any more than I did. When the relationships ended, he blamed himself, which continued this process. Of course they didn't like him, why would anyone like him?

One night, as he was cleaning his bathroom and comparing himself to some of the stuff he was scrubbing, God flashed a line in his mind: "Love your neighbor as yourself". He concluded that we know that it is not right to treat people badly. It is wrong to call people names and make them feel bad, like their not worthy. But if it is wrong to treat other people that way, why would it be acceptable to treat ourselves like crap?

As I was reading it, I felt like I was reading about myself. I could relate to just about everything he said. Most of the thoughts he portrayed had gone through my head again and again. And even though I have felt this way ever since I can remember, I had never confronted it.

I stayed up for another hour thinking about how it was wrong of me to ever think of myself as unworthy, as nothing, and how God created me for a reason, that there was a distinct purpose behind my life. I retraced all the meaningful relationships and events in my life and thought about how different they might have been had I only considered myself as deserving of those things.

As I prayed to God to forgive me and to help me to love myself, I could feel my heart begin to heal. almost instantly, my chest became noticeably lighter.

That night, I faced an issue I had avoided all my life. God has brought me to a low place and it's a long climb to the top, but the climb has begun. I believe that this was an extremely significant milestone in this Second Reboot. And I really hope that this is the beginning for a long awaited period of restoration in my life.