I tried everything.
Isn’t that how every testimonial starts? “I tried everything until I found this one solution that I just happen to be selling to you now for the low price of…”
But you cannot buy self love. You can buy pleasure. Or luxury. You can buy access to medical care. You can buy your way out of problems that cause depression, anxiety, stress, and health risks – like insufficient housing or food. But none of those things are the same as self love.
No, none of us can buy our way out of this one.
I tried all the things to buy, and I tried a bunch of therapies and I tried a whole lot of religion. The problem for me was that religion was not a cure for trauma. Medical care, therapy, and lifestyle change is the treatment for trauma. My spirituality helped me *cope* with trauma, but it didn’t treat it. And in my religion, in order to get that coping power I had to pretend the trauma didn’t exist. To belong meant spiritually bypassing my pain to prove that I loved Jesus enough to be healed and didn’t have to bother anyone with it. Performing that false healing while knowing what I lived with inside my head made me so ashamed. I felt so much shame for not having enough faith to be healed. In my private moments I knew that those messages weren’t from the god I worshipped, but that didn’t change the pain I felt of not belonging in my community.
When I was fed that much shame, how could I have possibly gotten to self love with a few affirmations? Every time I looked in a mirror and tried to repeat something a therapist had given me, I just felt like a liar. If I tried to list my positive attributes it wouldn’t make a dent in the self hate. I’d just think I was a waste of carbon who also had a nice smile. In the twisted narcissism of self loathing, I was convinced that there was no soul on this planet as uniquely unworthy of love as me.
Post trauma therapy, I see how that belief gives me away. None of us are special enough to be that uniquely awful. You know who is so convinced they’re unlovable? People who were not loved by someone who was supposed to love them.
When life hands you incontrovertible evidence that you are not loveable, because someone who traditional does, doesn’t seem to, how is just repeating ‘I love myself’ going to overcome that? Nothing I tried made a dent.
This changed, like most good things in my life, through being Atticus’ mom.
Atticus is disabled from birth and has high support needs. He is autistic and uses a wheelchair. His entire life long I have watched how people treat him, how systems treat him, how people and systems treat me as an extension of him, and grown angrier and angrier and angrier. The amount of bigotry disabled people experience is so overwhelming that I rarely find other parents who can understand what we deal with.
I am so grateful to be a part of the disability community because it’s like living on the island of misfit toys. We’ve made a little haven for ourselves where Atti gets to be exactly as he is and be appreciated for that. Disabled spaces are beautiful, generous, accepting spaces where people show each other such tender care, knowing that we depend on each other for our survival. And then those people log off or go back out into the world and are mistreated and overlooked and denied care by a world who refuses to treat them with respect. I will be angry over this every day of my life. It has radicalized me to fight for a world where every human is recognized as having inherent worth and dignity.
Somewhere along that journey I realized. ‘Uh oh. Every single human has inherent worth and dignity, and I’m a human. Does that mean me too?’
It did. If every human has inherent worth and dignity, that means even I – who was a special unique kind of unworthy of love – had inherent worth and dignity. I had to take the long way to treating myself better, but I got there.
In the new world we’re living in, the old values don’t apply. You are not valuable for the work you do or the physical feats you perform or how well you appease power. Your value is in your humanity.
Developing Body Loyalty meant developing a whole new value system. Some that govern how I treat myself, and these that govern how I treat others.
All bodies have dignity because all humans have value.
The value that Atticus brings to my life is immeasurable. He is the best thing that ever happened to me and I can’t even think about him without tears springing to my eyes. It is such a gift to me to get to be a part of his world, where hierarchy and status and competition are irrelevant and we just focus on our love and joy. I have learned to approach differences with curiosity instead of fear, and have grown to love all the different ways human bodies come. My life is filled with so much beauty where there used to be ignorance and fear. I am so deeply enriched by relationships with all manner of people who are different from me. Our value is not in our productivity, that is a lie meant to take advantage of us. Our value is in the love we give to others, and the love we accept in return.
Body Loyalty illuminates a path from body hatred to self love.
If you’re at the bottom of a shame pit, talk of self love sounds like mythology. A story from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. If you find a way to climb out of the pit you’ll see self love like an oasis off in the distance, but until then you have to take it on faith. Finding the motivation to do all the work of healing of faith alone is just an impossible ask for most of us. I needed something in between. A ladder down into the pit with a rest stop at the top. And for me, Body Loyalty was that in between. I believe that after practicing Body Loyalty for a while, you’ll find your way to self love, but that is often way too overwhelming a journey to take in one go.
Everyone deserves to have autonomy.
A sense of personal authority is foundational to a sense of self. I watch disabled kids who are robbed of their ability to make choices or personal preferences and the results are devastating. The color of your shoes only seems like a small choice to someone who is allowed to make it. This is true in health choices too. The person living with the consequence of that choice is the person who should be making it. This is an integral part of respecting individual dignity.
After everything we’ve been through the last three years, we should see that our only safety lies in each other. The new values I developed for Body Loyalty were in part about how I treat myself, and part about how I treat others. We all have ample evidence now that we are only as safe as our neighbors, and that individual action alone cannot keep us safe from systemic harm. We humans are communal creatures. Wherever we’re going, we’re going to get there together.