Self love is a lie.
It's one of the greatest lies of our time. Self love is masturbation. And what is masturbation if not the lie of lovemaking?
But, see, in order to really talk about this, we have to have the same definition of love. Love is a word in the English language with many meanings – and many degrees of meaning. Other languages - like Spanish, for instance – have different words for love depending on the various types and degrees. I'm not a Spanish linguist, but I speak enough to have a little understanding of what I'm talking about.
But what is love?
As best as I can make out, love is a sensation in the brain, a particular cocktail of emotional chemicals. Loving someone or something over time seems to be the ritual observance of stimulating those chemicals during and without the lovemaking act.
There is no lovemaking act in a friendship. So what is the love of a friend as oneself, as Aristotle talked about? By his own definition, friendship is viewing another person on the same plane as yourself – literally, it is observing and considering them to the same degree as one would oneself. The assumption behind this definition requires that every individual views themselves at the top of their personal hierarchies.
Which doesn't seem to be universal. Sort of. If you look at it from a particular perspective.
There are some truths about being human which make this assumption a safe one, especially when viewed through the Esoteric lens. Our brains model reality with us at the center. From this vantage, it's pretty easy to say that every person is the center of their universe – that every individual is, in their own way, God. This is also, as Manly P Hall reminds us repeatedly throughout all of his work which I've read, the first mistake that all humans make: thinking that because they create reality they are in that way analogous to god.
I think therefor I am is incorrect. What is closer to right, I think is I think, thereby I am wrong.
This is also known as hubris.
You see, ancient people understood self love in much the same way we do. Maybe to a lesser degree of complexity than is our want today, but they understood it. Our word for excessive self-love comes from their parable of self-love that's gone wrong: Narcissism – Narcissus.
Narcissism and narcissist are interesting to me as words. Usually we reserve -isms and -ists for worldviews and ideologies – their philosophies and their practitioners. But that's what it is to take self-love too far, isn't it? It's a worldview and ideology no different from any of the religious or political worldviews and ideologies we've created and complexified into the modern world. Narcissism is, perhaps, the most first and most fundamental worldview/ideology available to the human mind.
People like me, especially young people (and most especially confused and impressionable youth) are confused by all of these things I've been talking about. I can say that confidently because reading through my words to make sure I'm staying as cogent as I can, I am distinctly aware of how confused I appear.
Humility, we're told, is the opposite of narcissism, and a narcissist is the worst thing you can be besides a Socialist. Which is hilarious to me – hilarious because that's a confused statement all by itself. These things are antithetical - the current "Capitalist" status quo is narcissism, and Socialism is institutional humility.
Many of these things I'm about to say are going to stop being universal – or, at least, they're going to stop being things that we can all agree on universally.
Women and men have very different relationships to humility and self-love. So when I talk about self-love being a lie, I'm talking to those members of my audience who happen to be women, trans-, intersectional, or gay – because when I see people obsessed with self-love and how difficult it is, I see women, trans-, intersectionals, and gays.
But I still don't have good definitions. I'm vacillating because this is a topic only deeply ignorant and stupid men (and deeply manipulative and complicit women) are typically willing to talk about. This conversation I'm having with myself is the kind of thing that gets a person Canceled. Or it's the kind of thing that gets them a larger platform – not my goal. I'm trying to connect with an audience of confused people who want, if not real answers, real attempts to engage with the Questions.
Real meaning genuine.
I see a lot of un-genuine people in the public sphere. Falseness and fraudulence are as much a part and parcel of self-love and being a public figure as flatulence is to a bean-heavy diet. I can't dip my toes into the UFO/Paranormal communities without identifying all the fraudulence and dis-ingenuity which permeates the fields.
(Is this where I talk about how I started reading Dune because people are saying that even my dude Villanueve couldn't properly make a Dune movie – also because everyone who has ever read Rob's words or listened to me talk about what he's trying to tell us Reality really is for any amount of time have told me I need to read Dune? Because, I've started reading Dune, and the first scene has touched me to the core of my being. Fuck it. I'm doing it.)
I'm going to jump ship from what I started talking about like I do so often – not because I'm afraid of the topic (I really don't care if you stop reading this. I would like it if you didn't, but I've come to terms with the fact that those people who are accidentally in my proximity would prefer that either they weren't or I stopped talking. It's okay – I forgive you. And, really, if I did care, then I would be lying if I said that I wasn't doing this for the likes, for the money. Which I'm not getting either of.)
These two things are related. Maybe what I'm doing is building pathos (or ethos, whichever it is; my internet is down and I can't double-check the definitions, and I really need to get this thing moving again, I've been doing a lot of stage whispering). Maybe I'm trying to establish that I really do have a marketable skill.
I've talked a lot about magick and skill. I think I began to pose the question of whether – If it is true that a sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magick, is it also true that a sufficiently advanced magick would be indistinguishable from technology?
Paul evidently has this skill that lets him feel truth - in Dune.
Maybe it's instinct, maybe it's a particularly sensitive bullshit detector, but I've always been able to do this. I can smell a lie like a bloodhound can smell an escaped convict. Maybe It's like I've described in these pages: my parents were habitual liars, especially to me, especially about the things that didn't matter enough for them to lie. And maybe it's that I've spent 34 years in this world effectively on my own – definitely unable to depend on literally anyone for literally anything.
That's a cynical thing to say, especially from a person who's spent the last two years living on the mercy and kindness of friends and acquaintances and strangers alike. But it is what I learned.
I couldn't count on my family for food – my friends throughout high school paid for my lunches at school or bought me Little Debbie cakes or whatever they could spare from their lunch money. I was kicked out by my mother on my 18th birthday because she didn't think I'd actually leave. My roommates at my first apartment either bailed to join the military or refused to get a job, leaving me to pay all of the rent and utilities for a 3-bedroom apartment by myself.
I feel like I sound like I'm bitching.
Is that humility, or is that guilt?
We make such a big deal about people talking about the hard things they've overcome in their lives. Like that Simpsons character over which they evidently jumped the shark - Frank Grimes. When you aren't already successful and you talk about your hardships, you're bitching or making excuses why you aren't where you want to be – even if where you want to be is a lateral move, vis-a-vis “success”. And when you are successful, you're inspiring.
I don't know.
I had a dream last night that someone was talking to me about something I'd written. Somewhere in these pages (according to the dream, at least), I described myself as a loser. This person, a female (I can't remember her body type, only that she had a dark pixie cut), was telling me that I'm not a loser. This is a conversation I've had maybe two dozen times since I moved back to Ohio (so over the last six years or so). Females do not like it when the man they are infatuated with describes himself a loser.
Infatuation is a lesser form of love – it seems to me to be something like the chemical cocktail of love unstirred by insertion of a penis (or fingers, I guess; I'm not trying to be graphic, just honest). The Thelemites in the audience are amused by this. They love their cult leader's not-at-all-subtle dick jokes.
Maybe that guilt – because you know that I agree with Rob when he said, “Yeah. They punish people. They judge you. They teach you to feel guilt. Guilt is guessing that other people will disapprove of you. Guilt is other people making your choices, putting their thoughts in your head, controlling what and how you feel. Guilt is, clearly, highly effective crowd control. Religion is crowd control. What it is not is either healthy, or the optimal platform for any government to build its foundation on.” When he says government, I would say society, but whatever.
Maybe that guilt I'm feeling for identifying myself as a loser is what I'm talking about in a nutshell: The Lie of Self-Love and how it hurts women— Women and gays and trans- and intersectionals, especially.
The lie of love in a marriage is that you have to like every single thing about a person and you can't ask them to change anything for you. The lie is that love isn't work.
Work is defined as effort over time. A ritual is behavior which causes an expected outcome.
I don't know why I'm weaving Love and Magick together like the double-helix of DNA, but that's what I realize I'm doing, artistically, here.
So when I say that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick, I'm talking about how we treat our phones, how we treat our computers, our televisions. The vastest majority of us don't know how the technology we interact with every day works, let alone how to optimally get it to do what it wants to do. What we know are those things which our confirmation bias has shown us to work.
This is what Pascal was talking about with his famous Wager. It's also what anthropologists are doing when they scoff at the ritual behavior of “primitive” peoples – and what atheists are doing when they deny the gods of other men.
And I'm back to every person being the center of their universe. I wish this were intentional. I wish I could say that my thoughts masterfully circled around on themselves – but, no. This is the way of the universe, as I see it. When you give yourself over to the Esoteric worldview, everything is connected. And everything is all swirling the same drain, as it were. That “drain” is a multi-dimensional funnel, and its narrowest opening is our consciousness.
Meditate on that mental image for a while and tell me you don't see Buddhist mandalas exploding behind your eyes.
Do we all know Pascal's Wager? Basically, the idea is are you going to wager your eternal soul on the bet that there is no God, or are you going to live as though there were one just in case there is?
There is a particular magick to being embodied as we are. We all have to learn the things that our bodies are capable of, how people react to them, and the rituals necessary to get the outcomes we wish from our bodies. This is the revelation that health nuts have when they start eating well and exercising and limiting their TV and telephone times: our bodies are our homes in this three-dimensional reality. This is the inverse realization that models – of any sort, but particularly that industry of fame for fame's sake; but not sex workers, it appears to me (not the vast majority, at any rate).
What do I mean by that? I mean that there are people who have realized that their bodies are such that they can trade them for the things they want. Usually after a career of this there is massive regret. This is something the #MeToo movement unocculted: There are many, many people who have been sexually manipulated, but there seem to be many more who were complicit in the objectivization of others. Who, in fact, took advantage of the industrialization of sexual misconduct.
…
I find philosophers amazing.
I read a lot of philosophy. I read a lot of theology, actually. Like, right now I'm reading Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, Plotinus's The Enneads, and Jordan Peterson's The Maps of Meaning. I find it frankly incredible that philosophers are able to organize their thoughts and their arguments into cogent chapters. I feel overwhelmed trying to organize any thought – not just because of my mind's habit to send my thoughts racing, either.
One idea bleeds into another idea for me, requiring a third idea to explain them both and how they relate to one another – and always I feel like with every new word or idea I introduce, I have to introduce a second and a third to articulate them. This is a Me problem. This is the result of having too many one-sided conversations, too many conversations that have never left the confines of my skull. This is an I Don't Know What You Know problem – an I Am Insecure That You're Going to be Insecure problem.
I'm just bitching again. I call it articulating my failing so I can come up with a plan to overcome it; but I've been told my whole life it's just bitching – so maybe it is just bitching. Maybe I'm not really going to do anything about it now that I've identified it.
So how is self-love a lie in all this? I've made it three manuscript pages without really trying to tackle the subject. I've just wandered about through definitions and miasmal minefields.
Self-love teaches us to love our bodies. It teaches us to identify with and objectify our bodies.
Self-love comes to us from the famous for the sake of being famous crowd. It's filtered down from the models and the actresses and the (female, do I need to remind you of that?) musicians who have made that inverted realization I mentioned earlier: women who understood the industry to be built around sexual misconduct and who took advantage of that to climb and make for themselves a niche in the Pyramid.
Did you know that there is a pyramid in Asia – it might even be in China. It's the oldest in the world, and we used to think it was a small mountain or a huge hill. Evidently, the people who built this pyramid lived on it. Their society was stratified by where you lived on it, with the lowest peasants at the bottom and the highest elements, the Élites – religious and political or otherwise – at the top. We instinctually know civilization exists in this way. It's in all of our stories. The Élites are at the top, the peasants are at the bottom. And we understand ourselves to live somewhere near the middle-top. We think we're the princes and the princesses and the heroes of all of our stories.
This is an aside, but: I grew, by early adulthood, not weary – bored – by how every Fantasy story and too many Sci-Fi stories are about a person from the lowest levels of society ascending to the highest levels of society through their personal excellence. It's wish fulfillment, for sure. I'm sure there are no few of you reading this now thinking that Rob sure seems to be a whole hell of a lot of my own wish fulfillment. And – you know, I wish you were right.
But I think I've already talked too much about how I need too many degrees of separation from myself and my art because of the guilt I feel for having wishes at all – let alone fulfilling them in fiction... or in rope.
I grew tired of this wish fulfillment for one reason: We aren't the princes and princesses and the heroes of the stories we read. Those people have emotions like we have, and they react to situations maybe like we would react – but that is the author's magick: bringing to life what exists only in their minds.
And if I'm talking about the Esoteric worldview, I have to talk about how I've come to think of everything, no matter how fictional or obviously false as real to the same degree. It's something Rob taught me – and something he's refused to incorporate into The Lesvos Serpent so far – but I find it useful. Especially when paired with my bullshit detector. I find it useful for most things, that is.
It's made enjoying fiction a chore.
We – and I don't care how far up the Pyramid you think you are – are the richest peasants in history.
No matter where you are, if you can read this – seeing as it's digital-only and exists exclusively in an online space – you are a peasant in the scheme of the world society. And you're fooling yourself if you don't think this Civilization spans the entire globe, all of its continents, every one of its nations, and all but the smallest percentage of its people.
But we're still peasants.
Everything goes back to the Yeoman revolution for me. Lots of people want to start with Rome or Greece or the World Wars, but for me, it's the 14th century.
When the peasantry were allowed, toward the end of the Middle Ages in Europe, to gather personal, generational wealth, everything changed. Asia, from Istanbul East, has had a long history of this. But it was the European Yeoman class that changed everything. The ways in which European society settled after this extremely tumultuous period have set the mold for the way everything works all over the world. The British Empire impressed their social pyramid on all of their colonial and empirical possessions, and the rest of the European colonial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries followed in their suit, just in their own ways.
Why am I talking about this?
I actually do have a point.
The model that we use today for artists and entertainers is the same model that the nobility following the Yeoman revolution established. They looked to antiquity, to Rome and Greece for sure, for precedent; but really their choice is too simple not to be obvious. The Élite are at the top, and so long as they're doing what the Élite want, Entertainers and Artists are allowed to benefit from the exposure being in the company of the Élite, indeed, being a patron of an Élite – and all the riches and fame that implies.
What we don't talk about, or what we don't like to think about while we are enjoying our own wish-fulfillment fantasies about riches and fame – either as artists or entertainers or as the princes and princesses of our stories – which come with acceptance into the gold-capped peak of the Pyramid, is the way we will be taken advantage of by those on the rung(s) above ours.
It's more popular the last decade, especially among women's entertainment, for art to more accurately represent life. Women are increasingly telling their stories, and being a woman and a storyteller cannot be an easy life. My life is a ball of shit, and I'm still a white male with all the privileges that come with those statuses. Being a woman is an instant step back as a storyteller, and you could forget telling your stories to an audience wider than your immediate proximity if you weren't white before the last decade.
But I'm cynical enough to notice that many of the stories about “bad men” are saccharine and feel-good for a particular subset of women who want to be angry at men for perceived injustices. Meanwhile, the stories that cut the deepest are the ones women write about complicit women – because they're the stories which are most real, which most accurately represent the world we live in.
I've run over my limit, but I'm not done. I've been constipated, and this stream of consciousness shit is happening.
I've noticed that the Dune movie has gotten overall positive reactions. I particularly enjoyed how MovieBob described it, when he said that the gender-swaps and narrative changes were to really hit home how the women in the story were complicit in its villainy. This perked my ears up.
I've noticed through my life that there are very real and very-well defined Male and Female spheres of consciousness in this world. To be female is to be different from a male. It isn't simply a biological fact of genitals and brain structure – nor is it really a conversation of to what degree the biology is fluid. Those things, like the initial discovery that I Am God, are a Red Herring, a false lead, a dead end. Philosophically, they're non-starters. Because they don't matter.
To be a Woman, to whatever degree it is a choice, is fundamentally and inarguably different than being a Man. And it's orders of magnitude more complex.
I used to draw a lot when I was younger, especially by high school. I got decent. If you really wanted to try to stalk me online, you could probably find my DeviantArt from when I was a child. Another thing I got discouraged with and gave up on. But I always drew males.
Not specifically because the one time I drew a female my mother said, “Well, I guess we know what he likes in a woman.” I was like thirteen and didn't even know how to make the lines I was drawing yet. Whatever. Everyone goes through that. I wasn't alone in it, and it didn't influence my choice. I drew males because I am male. The male body is what I can look down or into a mirror at and see.
I know this is not the process by which many – probably the vastest majority – of artists learn their skill. But as with my thoughts and my writing, I am the only working model of the universe I have ritually had at my disposal.
I noticed around that time that it seemed that most males drew females. As a man in my mid-thirties, I can confidently say that pattern remains the same, except I can expand the sentence to include females. It seems pretty universal that artists prefer to render the female form.
I asked a friend in high school why this was the case. She said it was because the female body was more difficult to draw. More challenging.
But I wonder if it isn't because the female body isn't more marketable.
Males aren't really supposed to talk about their body image issues, including dysphoria.
I know what it is to hate the body you're trapped in.
I'm tall and reed-thin. It's always been a problem. My father, an Army vet and gorillaman, ridiculed me for being too skinny my entire childhood. That's to be expected. I remember once as an adult, my grandfather told me that I had finally grown up, now I needed to grow out, indicating that I would only be accepted as a man in my family and the world if I were fat. The school of parenting my father came from, you beat up your boys and made them mean because no one could be as terrifying or as threatening as their father. And, let me tell you, it worked. I'm not afraid of nobody, and I've told no few people in my adulthood who have wanted to threaten me with violent conflict that my dad used to beat my ass on the regular just to do it when I small, defenseless child. You aren't a threat to me. That usually ends conflict. No one wants to fight someone who isn't afraid of them.
No one actually wants to fight. Well—
No one well-adjusted wants to fight.
But what I'm trying not to really talk about because it is actually really painful and I'd prefer not to think about it— Everyone I've been with, either as a friend, a lover, a partner, has complained that I'm too tall and too thin. Even when I was in the best shape of my life, my fiancée complained that my chest isn't broad enough. And when they're not complaining, they're telling me that I should transition into a woman. Which—
If that doesn't inform your opinion about how people actually think about what it means to be trans, it has mine.
I used to joke about it when I was younger, when Transitioning wasn't faddy yet, by saying that I'd already spent too much time and money on my identification as a man, I wasn't going to change gears, now. What am I going to do with my band shirts and flannels? But as I got older and Transitioning has become faddy, I find it increasingly annoying and hurtful.
Like—
You're not going to like this. I've lost my entire female audience with this post, and I haven't even said the part you're going to hate. I think it's because we've created a social environment where only women are allowed to speak in public. This is not the way it's ever been. And it isn't working. It's not working for me, that's for sure. And if it's not working for me, it's not working for others.
I'm not the only boy who was raised to hate the world. And let me tell you, I'm not the only person who's considered ending his life on a killing spree, just to really show the world how much I hate it and to make sure as many families remember my name as possible. I wouldn't do it because I'm not insane. I'm not completely broken by this society in which I have no place and can take no part. As I'm writing this, I've even been banned from Twitter. So.
Can't blame anyone other than myself. Can't treat everyone with the respect I'd demand before someone gets butthurt. Funny that it was a male. It's almost always a male. Women don't know when they're beaten, and aren't socially isolated to the point that when their feelings are hurt they have to use cowardly channels to hurt you – get in an argument with a female on Twitter, and she has all her gay friends and followers jump you. Get in an argument with the wrong socially isolated male on Twitter and he calls you a faggot after blocking you or reports you to Twitter for calling him an idiot after he called you, a rape victim, a rape apologist.
Sigh.
Men and Women have very different spheres. And what it means to be a Man and to be a Woman are very different things.
This is why the editors of Genesis almost ruined the whole game of Creation by going back and articulating the primal, essential difference between – not the sexes – but the Ideas of the Genders.
I've already said that being a female is orders of magnitude more complex than being a male. What did I mean by that?
To be a Man is to be in one of two Psychic/Spiritual states: Either Father or Son. Being a Man is a static existence – binary. You are either Son or Father, there is no third way.
To be a Woman, on the other hand, is triform in triplicate: Maiden, Mother, Crone, yes; but within each of these division is a subdivision of triune states. Women, unlike men, go through many metamorphic phases in their lives. From daughter to wife, from maid to matriarch, from Creatrix to Guardian. Womanhood is the churning darkness of Chaos – and it is beautiful.
When we look at a male form, we see Order. We see straight lines, very little variation in nature. But women— Just in their sexual aspects, women vary in size and shape on an individual basis. There are millions of men who look just like me. I know it, because every woman I've loved has found my better version. I am a real-life The Baxter. (That movie ruined my life. Not really, that's a joke. It gave me a visual language to articulate one of my archetypes. Which is pretty cool. Thanks, Michael Showalter.)
That's why we don't draw males. That's why we don't represent males as often in visual art. Which is a funny thing to say, because women will tell you that movies have been male-dominated for too long – not just the stories that are told and the players portraying them and the people profiting from them, but the interesting parts to play. And of course they're right.
Industry starts with boys playing with a thing and then selling it to one another at a profit. There are girls who have done this sort of thing. But it's boys you hear about staging plays on their porches or making newspapers for their town or charging their friends to see the weird lizard they found. There are girls. Of course there are girls. But my experience through life has not presented those girls to me.
That's why those girls are Manic Pixie Dream Girls, right?
I don't really understand that term. So maybe tell me if I'm framing it wrong. What I mean is that's why boys fetishize those girls. And why those girls tend to be lesbians or uninterested in boys in general. Such is my observation of the stories and the women I've had a chance to listen to.
Equality is allowing those girls to tell their stories in the same space and at the same level of competition. But equality is a lie, too. We are not on a level playing surface – remember, we live on a pyramid.
All of this is a long and painful way of saying that women agreed to be sexually assaulted to further their careers for thousands of years before #MeToo, and will continue to do so. It is the one advantage a woman has if she chooses to exist within the Male Sphere – any woman who doesn't use it is crippling herself.
And that's really what I'm talking about. Our perception that she shouldn't isn't ours. It's most certainly not mine. It's guilt. It's the feelings of women who aren't powerful enough in their bodies (or who aren't attractive enough, frankly) to take advantage of the men around them to gain power within their sphere. The women who taught us to feel this were moderately powerful in the Female Sphere – and brought this idea out of the private thoughts of the women at the top of the Pyramid and into the Social Sphere (that orb which overlaps the other two) for one very simple reason: It was the effective play in the political game. Men, those old guard players in the Social Sphere, allowed women to bring this squabble out of their private places, their drawing boards, knitting circles and cross-stitch lounges, because it was advantageous to them: So long as women squabble with one another in public, they remain divided and easily marginalized.
Frankly, it is the role of women to regulate all of the various spheres of existence. It has been since humans formed their smallest organized groups.
Just think about how much more influential Oprah Winfrey is than Geraldo Rivera, for example. And because of that, women are overwhelmingly interested in regulating the behavior of other women. This is and has always been the basis of "social media". By and large, I have observed women thinking about men in two ways: as some other woman's son who needs to be dealt with, or as an idiot to be molded or manipulated as she pleases. Their engagement with other women, on the other hand, is significantly more complex.
This is how we can have a series of reality shows about the Housewives of the rich and famous, but no one especially cares about the husbands. I am reminded of Kristin Cavalari's reality show, and Jay Cutler being completely checked out.
All of this feels like it could very easily be argued that I'm defending the Patriarchy. I can't defend something I exist outside of. I'm describing it. And I'm plotting its growth backward in time. I don't know how you do it, but I was taught that if you want to get rid of a weed, you have to rip it out by the root, otherwise it will keep coming back. That's how I think about social progress.
I can't see us moving forward until we identify the root of our problems.
Maybe a better analogy is cancer.
My understanding is that no matter how dead you kill a cancer and no matter how much of it you cut out of the body, if you allow even a single cell to survive, there is a nonzero chance it will come back to life and recontinue cannibalizing the host.
This is what an intellectual contagion can do.
The Patriarchy continues to exist because we continue the behaviors that brought it into being in the first place. We just don't know what they are.
Rigidly defining the sexes, for instance. That seemed to be something that defined the Patriarchy. But it seems to me that mothers are the ones who want their children to be a particular thing. I know no intersectional humans, but I know a lot of girls who got zero pressure from their fathers, and the relationship with their mother is ruined because the mother wanted them to be "girly". It's mothers who are meant biologically to be involved at every stage of development and to make the majority of the child's choices for them. This is what childhood conditioning is: proving to your mother that you will behave the way she expects you to when she can't see you. It's the first thing we all learn how to do – break the rules when Mom isn't looking. Not Dad. Dad has never cared once in our lives. In fact, dad caring is how we knew he was gay. The only time this isn't a universal experience is when a child has no mother.
And I don't need to tell you that there is very real evidence that children grow up weird if they don't have two parents, one of either identifying gender, and a wide familial support network.
So how does all this murky talk about gender identity and the Patriarchy have anything to do with Self Love?
I'll tell you.
It's those very women who have sacrificed everything, who have been complicit their entire lives in selling out their sisters and their nephews for their personal profit, who are pressuring you to self-love even when you don't feel like it. If they have to self-love so hard, they may as well do like the boys they so badly want to be, and market their heartbreak and sorrow for the world to wear like a smiling mask over a sex slave's broken face.
I'm winding down on this one. I've exposed a lot of wounds and injured myself a little more than was necessary for this thing. Exposed myself to a lot of misguided criticism, too. Which makes me afraid. And I haven't been coping with fear very well, lately.
I'm not telling you you shouldn't love yourself. I'm telling you that masturbation is different from lovemaking. And painting yourself up like a whore so you can take pictures to send to no one in particular just so you can get the serotonin bump from your magickal phone... is maybe not the most effective way to actually love yourself.
Loving oneself is difficult. If loving another is work, then loving oneself is the work of a lifetime.
We fall out of love with people because the chemical cocktail isn't enough to overcome our disdain for them.
How can we claim to love ourselves if we disdain what we do to love ourselves? We can't, it's that easy. If you are feeling like always being pretty, or always being clever, or always having the best alcohol at the party is loving yourself, then you have a seriously flawed definition of love.
Especially if you are a woman.
The love of a mother for her creation, the love of a wife for her husband, these are magickal, spiritual things. Eternal things. Sacred things. And without understanding yourself as a spiritual being first, there is no way to actually love yourself. There's too much wrong with us. Too much that needs to be painted over to hide the blemishes – to make believe no one can see your tears.
There is a reason that make-up is such an important part of the beauty culture: what is presented is a lie.
If you really want to love yourself, you have to hate yourself just as hard. You have to be able to identify what you are doing wrong and fix it. Because if you're the kind of husband who always leaves the toilet seat up, you had better have a redeeming quality, or you're going to be an ex-husband.
But maybe that's just my decidedly masculine worldview.
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