If you hate yourself, you can fall in love with someone in the hope that they’ll recognize something in you which you don’t even dare to believe in.
Seek out people who trigger your insecurity, so that their love for you will show and prove your value. But it never works out, because who wants to love someone who obviously sees themselves as inferior? Only psychopaths want to be with people who see themselves as less worthy than themselves.
And if they do love you – then you’ve got to ask yourself what’s wrong with them, if they’re willing to degrade themselves enough to love someone like you – a worthless person.
You put a trap for yourself – and that’s the whole trick. You put yourself in situations which cannot go well. You invent equations which, regardless of how you solve them, always come out to zero.
Most of all and most desperately you love the ones who made you feel worthless, since the moment they crushed your ego, they gained immense value as the only ones who can restore it.
You see yourself as weak and you despise the weak. You take the side of the strong. You’re bullied and wish you were one of the bullies. You neither want to help or be helped by others who suffer. Their suffering makes them weak and ugly in your eyes; as weak and ugly as you, and no help to you whatsoever.
You don’t see the boundary between yourself and others. Think other people prove something about you. That a hot girlfriend proves something about you: that you’re the kind of guy who has a hot girlfriend. Or the kind of girl that the hot guy wants. Wants much more than he wants other girls, even if he can get other girls.
If he can’t get other girls, what is he even worth?
What sort of guy would have to settle for you? Not a guy worth having.
The ones worth having, they turn their faces away… towards other views which you cannot see but desperately want to catch; views that exclude you, untouched snow landscapes without dirty human footsteps.
And you don’t want the girl who’s nerdy and insecure like you, you want the girl that the guy you wish you were had, because then you’d be like him, chosen by the power that creates and shapes the world.
You see guys or girls like yourself and you’re repulsed, like when you hear your own voice recorded for the first time – do I really sound like that? Do I look like that when I laugh? You don’t want to recognize yourself, you want to be exchanged. You seek what you don’t have in other people.
And what is it they have that you don’t? That elusive light. You, who always walk away from me, you who never comes.The shining thing, the power to revolutionize the world. The breath of god, beauty. Not just to feel it but to be it. To be it without knowing that you are it, living in eternal grace.
Isn’t it strange when you notice someone projecting onto you? That they look at you, and it’s like a lunar eclipse; something else, mysterious, moves across your face, in the space where the eyes of the observer meet that which shines. There and then, you know: I will disappoint you, because what you want from me can’t be given by a human being.
All I can give you is this: That I am who I am, and that I am that when you’re with me.
If someone loved you, you’d think you must have fooled them. That you must have made them believe something about you which isn’t true, that you’re better than what you really are. And regardless of how much you wished that their love for you would prove this – that you actually ARE better than you think – suddenly the proof feels false and unreliable. And once again love must be tested by more and more difficult trials.
So you think you love me? That’s what you think? But would you still love me if I cheated on you? If I made fun of you in front of your friends? If I hurt your feelings and ignored you when you needed me? Would you love me then, still,would I be worth it? Would you love me if I shat myself, poured acid over my own face, became a nazi? No? You wouldn’t? Then I guess you never loved me.
At first, you want to be so beautiful that everyone who sees you has to love you. Then you say, hurt and suspicious: but do you only love me because I am beautiful?
Unconditional love. Seeking a love which can’t be denied. You might call it divine if you believed in it. But —
That’s the thing – no matter how many times someone says “I love you”, people like that can’t believe it for more than three minutes. So they seek uncertainty in unanswered feelings and deadlocks, because being uncertain, awaiting salvation, keeps the hope of salvation alive; refuses to recognize anything so brittle and mundane as actual human love.
Not only our lovers and love objects get to suffer; everyone else close to us gets to suffer, because they’re close to us and we hate us. We think, if you hadn’t stood close enough to me to show me where I end, then I would be infinite: then I’d be what I want to be, but you, with your love for me and your lame interests and all your flaws – you’re the one who limits me.
Admittedly it’s true that I, with deep desperation and despair, love a world that is lost every single day, that I love freedom when it slips out of my hands. But what can my friends do about that?
If you’re not the best, coolest, most desirable, then you’ve got to be a total nobody. It can’t just be that you’re normal, resistable to many, to some people appealing enough. That’d mean being like other people, and that’s impossible to live with; you’ve got to prove that you’re something more, irresistable,and if not that, loathsome, helplessly damned.
So you believe you take your seat in heaven, next to up-side-down saints, as the saint of eternal loss and losing. An idiot’s trick, really; to waste your only chance to experience, if only for a short moment, what’s most like paradise on earth. to never give yourself the power that creates worlds.
We think we’re not loved. That’s not the problem. The problem is that we don’t love other people. We aren’t willing to give them anything. Sure, you can think that “if they only did this and that, I would love them,” as if you need permission, but let us be honest – if they’d done what you wanted, the goalposts would be moved again, until they finally reach the deadlock you seek, where nothing can satisfy you. You’ve got to love them first. Whether you gain from it or not. As if gain or loss would mean anything. Who or what is even keeping the score? The only real loser is the one who won’t play.
Text and image: Zola Gorgon
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