Do you let yourself love your weirdness?

When I was growing up in Ireland, one of the ultimate slights on a person’s character was to say of them “My God, he (or she) loves himself!”.

It was generally said of anyone who dared to inch their head above the parapet, even ever so slightly, be it by their perceived eccentricity or flamboyance, their individual fashion style, or maybe just because they were gifted by nature with above-average good looks and a shade more charisma than the norm.

“Loving yourself” in 1980s and 1990s Ireland guaranteed social chastising characterised by unkind and snide remarks, rarely made to the person’s face, and fueled most likely by others’ insecurities and their own feelings of shame and unworthiness.

You see, happy, contented, and well-balanced people don’t engage in tearing other people down. They don’t engage in meanness. They don’t criticise or tease unkindly.

As long as no harm is being done, happy people allow other people to be, understanding that we’re all on our own path and the living of one’s life is a sovereign task that belongs to each individual and in which others should not interfere.

On a recent morning stroll, I was listening to Fred again and this song lyric caught me and stayed with me:

"Fall in love with someone that enjoys your weirdness not someone that tries talk to you into being normal" – Young Thug with Fred again

I put the song on repeat, and listened to it over and over for about an hour. Doing that kind of thing is part of my own personal weirdness. And at age 47, I have finally learned to be utterly unapologetic and unembarrassed about it.

It’s maybe the greatest gift and act of self-love I have ever given myself: the release from self-judgment, self-censorship, self-imposed conformity and all the accompanying shame.

I really can't recommend it highly enough.

Because, here’s the thing: pretty much every human on the planet has chased love at one point in their life. It could be the love of a parent. It could be the love of a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a husband, a wife.

That love is held in the gift of someone else. A someone else who matters in our eyes. A someone to whom we also want to matter.

Some people chase the love of another their whole lives, with an ardent desperation and fruitless frustration that is the thief of the joy and contentment that is everyone’s birthright.

And it seems to me we’re missing out on the most important step in that chase.

"If you have the ability to love, love yourself first" - Charles Bukowski

What if there’s a crucial, restorative and regenerative love story that we’re neglecting terribly in our pursuit of so frantically wanting to matter to a significant other?

What if the love we are so desperate to feel can only permeate our being once we have found the courage to love ourselves, embracing wholeheartedly all of our delicate weirdness and fragile foibles?

How much better able would we be to feel love if we stopped trying to talk ourselves into being “normal” and allowed ourselves to be who we really are?

How much “fuller” would we feel if we allowed ourselves to like what we truly like, and be how we really want to be?

How much more alive would we feel if we plugged all the energy drains that sap our life-force and allowed ourselves instead to do that which brings us joy and gets us vibrating on a frequency that resonates with the essence of our being?

What if we dared to perform the ultimate act of resistance, by daring to be our best selves?

Not in a smug or superficial Instagrammy or TikTokky way. I mean daring to be as real as we possibly can be, first for ourselves and then for others.

Vulnerable.

Authentic.

Whole.

Alive.

“Books have a way of finding their way into our lives, usually, right when we need them the most.” - Richard Denney

My sources of inspiration are many and varied. Just like the Fred again beat got me thinking intensely about self-love as the foundation of any successful relationship with another, on the very same day I was reading a book called The Courage to Be Disliked and came across a religious reference to the Torah.

By my own admission, I know very little about religion in general and I’m not a practicing anything. But I do my best to be open to learning and sometimes I come across things that give me skin tingles because they vehicle truth.

Like this Hebrew phrase: b’tselem elohim — translated literally, “in the image of the divine” — which means that our only responsibility is to be the best version of ourselves.

Irrespective of the religious context, this makes a lot of sense to me as a sound principle for better living. Particularly because it ties into the teaching of Albert Adler relayed in The Courage to Be Disliked, where one of the key messages is that in our lives we all have tasks and the combined outcome of these tasks is managing to pay reverence to our time on Earth by living as our best selves.

Because if we don’t take on that responsibility, who else could possibly do it for us?

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken" - Oscar Wilde

My friend, my wish for you today is this: allow yourself to love yourself. Fall in love with your weirdness. And never, ever talk yourself into being someone else’s idea of normal.

Be you.

Love you.

The good stuff you seek will find you.  

©AJ