Friday diary 15: I paid thousands to consider that I may be worthy of love simply for existing
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On Twitter recently someone asked “has anyone become massively more reliable to others without massively more self-coercion, guilt, shame etc? how did you do it?”
My response:
I try to run an epistemology that says if you’ve got a statement of fact that can’t be proven or disproven empirically, choose whether to believe it based on the likely results of believing it.
Imma break that down in to very tiny pieces. You may find the following helpful/interesting or boring/tedious. If you know you don’t need this broken down any further, scroll to the “THAT ESTABLISHED” and resume reading.
Here are two statements of fact:
- Women initiate the majority of divorces.
- God exists.
How likely is each statement to be “true?” Well, a person can evaluate the veracity of the first statement empirically in one of several ways. They could survey family court judges about who files for divorce. Then they could double-check the answers by looking into the court records.
There’s no way for any person to evaluate the second statement empirically. You could poll people, but that would just tell you what those people believe. There’s no compelling objective empirical evidence that stands up to scrutiny for or against its veracity.
“You are worthy of love simply because you exist” is a number-two type statement.
THAT ESTABLISHED
When my therapist, Joe, first suggested that I might be worthy of love simply for existing, I think I scrunched my face up. I told him it sounded like woo woo, crystal worship, Bay Area horseshit. One of the many things I love about Joe is that for all I know Joe might have a magic crystal butt plug in as I type this. But regardless, he looked at me and laughed and goes, “I know, right?!”
Eventually, we got to me telling him that I was worried that believing that I was good just for existing would lead to me doing less good in the world. I thought believing I was a fundamentally good person would make me a worse person.
Because without self-coercion, guilt, shame, etc. how would I find the motivation to keep doing good things? How would I find the energy to persist at hard things?
Believing I had to work hard to be worthy of love had worked well for me my whole life. But it was also killing me. Yes, I was doing good in the world. But I was also berating myself constantly. It was draining and exhausting and fundamentally alienated me from myself and others.
But what if I really were a good person, deep down? What if I didn’t need to believe I fundamentally sucked and had to work hard to not suck in order to work hard? What if I could use the love that’s already within me to power my hard work?
Was I ready to put down my painful-but-effective crutch and trust that my innate goodness and light (which may or may not exist) would carry me through?
I decided to give it a few weeks. I’d run an experiment where I acted as if I believed I was worthy of love just for existing. I’d try to stop saying “I should” and replace it with “It would benefit me if I.” I’d try to stop berating myself when I didn’t get something accomplished but instead give myself the grace I’d give a friend. I tried to believe I was the kind of person who did nice things because they’re nice, not because I needed to atone for anything.
I figured if I started to become an even lazier sack of shit I’d probably notice and could just stop the experiment before I did too much damage.
That was like three years ago. I still don’t know whether or not I’m worthy of love simply because I exist. I know the last time I did molly I felt strongly that I was. What I do know is that the past three years have been in many ways the most productive, meaningful, interesting, dynamic years of my life. Today I’m doing far more good for the world than I ever have in my life. I’m a better friend, a better thinker, and a better writer than I was when I thought I needed to earn worthiness. I’m more disciplined, not less, now that I think maybe I’m equally worthy of love either way.
So if you haven’t, give it a whirl and let me know how it goes for you.
Header images come from me putting the headline or some body copy (or other copy when the headline or body violates the TOS or spits out unusable results) into OpenAI’s DALL-E. Today’s prompt was “loving herself.”