You have heard the instruction often enough. Love yourself. Be kind to yourself. And you have probably tried it, the way a person tries a technique, and found that nothing much happened. The usual conclusion is that you did it wrong, or that the whole idea was soft nonsense.
There is a simpler explanation. When you turned around to love yourself, nobody was standing there.
You lose the one the love was meant for
Think about the shape of a life in which you do not show what you actually are. You keep the real thing out of view because you expect other people to criticise it, so you present something else and then live inside the presentation. In that arrangement, loving yourself is not difficult. It is impossible. There is no you in it. You have walked up to the place where the love is supposed to land and found the recipient missing.
The failure gets read as a failure of sincerity. It isn’t. What is missing is not effort but the person.
The you that gets seen is not the only you
When someone tells you to love yourself, notice which self shows up in your mind. Nearly always it is the you that gets seen — the version other people look at, the one you can inspect from outside like a photograph. And that is exactly the self you cannot stop at.
Inside that outer figure is another one you have to travel into: the you that is inside. That is the real you. The outer one is the one other people reach first; the inner one only you can go in and see. And standing between you and it, blocking the corridor, is a single thing. The mask.
The mask is just behaviour that dresses up the surface
The word mask sounds theatrical, but in daily life it is ordinary. You agree while resentment rises, smile while you are afraid, or say you are fine because you expect your need to be criticised. What you show and what you feel become two different things, and you hide the gap. The mask is simply the edited version of you that other people are allowed to see.
None of this comes out of bad character. It comes out of the expectation of blame — which is exactly why the mask is so hard to remove. You assume that the second it comes off, the criticism arrives. People are rarely frightened of the mistake itself; they are frightened of being caught making it.
The cat in the mirror who thinks it is a lion
There is a world made of what can be seen and what can be held in the hand. Call it the physical world. It is a fine standard for objects and a disastrous one for people, because if it is the only standard you own, this happens.
A cat looks into a mirror and experiences itself as a lion. You meet people like this. Nothing about them is as remarkable as they feel it to be, and they go on living inside the impression anyway.
The reverse is just as common: someone convinced their body is far heavier than it is, arguing with anyone who tells them otherwise.
One sees more than is there, the other sees worse than is there, and they look like opposite problems. They are the same problem. Both took what was in the glass to be themselves. Neither was looking at the real thing.
So you chase the version of yourself the physical world can display, and you go on meeting that version — and what it produces is not vanity. It is absence. You never arrive at the real you, and because you never arrive, there is nothing there to love.
You walk the hard road without knowing it is hard
A life lived through the mask makes you choose according to what preserves the image, not according to what you actually need. You stay agreeable in a relationship that hurts, accept work that empties you, or keep saying yes until resentment takes over.
Because each choice looks reasonable from the outside, you may not see why life keeps becoming painful. The pain then seems to come from nowhere. In fact, the same hidden self has been excluded from every decision.
Finding comes before loving
So there is an order here, and it is not optional. Before you can love yourself you have to find yourself. Loving is second. Until you have found the person, the sentence I love myself describes nothing.
This self does not rest on how you look. But appearance is what is available first — the surface, the part you can get your hands on — and starting there is not the mistake. Stopping there is. The road has to pass through the surface and keep going inward. You have to look into your own inside. Mistake the trailhead for the destination and you stop there. Why self-love feels fake takes up the same complaint at length.
You need a reasonable mask
Does that mean taking every mask off? How would you even manage it. Nobody lives in society with nothing on. A reasonable mask is necessary. Saying whatever is inside you in whatever order it arrives is not honesty; mostly it is just unsorted.
But to meet the real thing you also have to be able to take it off — and you must not take it off where it needs to stay on. When it needs wearing, wear it; when it needs removing, remove it. So the real skill is neither removal nor concealment. It is the discernment that tells you what kind of room you are standing in right now.
One place where you can put it down
For that you need at least one place where it can come off. Somewhere you can put it down and pull a ridiculous face like a small child, or dance, and nobody in the room will remark on it. Not a place where you are admired. A place where nothing is being assessed. Without a place like that, the you that is inside never comes out, and you can go a long time without noticing the absence, because the outer one keeps answering for you.
And when you do put it down, somebody shows up in the space it was occupying. Often not a charming somebody. A child with a vicious look on her face. A child who is crying. That is who you have to sit with. Refuse the meeting and you cannot go any further in; it is a sequence, and this is the step.
The order holds. The mask comes off first; then the real one can be found. Loving comes after that. Only once the person is back in the room does the word love have anything to attach to.
Related
- That Isn’t Love, That’s Liking
- I Looked After Myself, and the Guilt Got There First
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board