self less

on meeting myself for the first time

When I was 26, I was sitting in my therapist’s office trying to figure out how to answer his question.

What do you mean by that? I asked him.
I mean what I said. Has Hamilton ever been in a room?

Completely stupid question. We were literally in a room then. I’d been in all kinds of rooms. Practice rooms and racquetball courts. Elevators and libraries. Movie theaters and saunas and Hot Topic.

I was dodging it, of course, because I sort of knew the answer, and it wasn’t an answer I liked.

We talked about it, and I’ve written about it here before, but I described myself as those little matryoshka dolls: shells inside of shells, encircling something vast and wholly unexplored. I couldn’t have told you what the core of this star was made of—or if there was a core at all.

It’s a symptom of codependency and a lifelong struggle against depression: I became the version of myself that the room I was in demanded, so that I could walk as unturbulently as possible. Reduce my wake at all costs.

But as I’ve gotten a little bit older, grown a little farther removed from that completely broken version of myself sitting in a therapist’s office just a few months before the worst year of my life, I think that I have identified the source of my self-less-ness, and how I have started to escape it.

---

greater love has no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.

I grew up hearing that it was my job as the Christian man to be the smallest one in the room. Not the physically smallest, the emotionally smallest. It was my job to lift existing burdens and heap as few of my own.

Existing was sort of like turning left on a green light: you only go if you can make it without making the oncoming traffic have to hit their brakes. It was my job to make sure the people around me had what they need, not to make sure the people around me could help with mine.

I think part of this might come down to personality, obviously. I don’t particularly love the spotlight when I’m in a room full of people, and I don’t think any amount of healing will really change that. But as I’ve learned about myself and about my faith, I think that I’ve also learned a lot of the way I perceived myself is due to a pretty flawed (and pretty offensive) teaching about self in the first place.

Deny yourself, I was taught. Take up your cross: be ready to die.
My heart is wicked, sick, incurable, they told me.
Selfishness—and, God forbid, love of self—was a sin.
I had to be a Martha, not a Mary.
I had to be a servant to all like my Christ.
I had to give of myself before I would ever consider taking for myself.

Now here’s the thing. I don’t really have an issue with a lot of this. I think that, on this side of a little bit of walking and a little bit of healing, it’s pretty good advice.

But the thing is, I didn’t even have a self to deny.
I didn’t have a heart to follow.
I didn’t know how to know what I needed. Much less wanted.

Because I was supposed to deny all of that anyway, so what was the use of even exploring it?

What’s the use of wanting anything when you’re taught, make your wants God’s wants, and then ask for whatever you want?

I was taught to love my neighbor as myself,
but I was also taught to not love myself at all.

---

I didn’t even know who I was supposed to be. I didn’t have any concept of what I was like outside of my utility to others (which is the very definition of codependent).

It led to a guy who was agreeable but spineless.
It led to a guy who had friends but not respect.
It left me empty and lost. It left me self-less

Here I was halfway through my twenties, and Hamilton was just a wisp, some sheet that floated from room to room and let other people project whatever they wanted onto him. Like a multi-tool you forget in a drawer.

And I’m sorry to say that I continued like this for another nine years.

That’s not to say I didn’t make improvements, and that’s not to say that things didn’t get better. I escaped abuse and healed. I fell in love with and married someone who had once only been a friend. I got a better job, I honed a few skills, I got some miles under my belt…but this year has been different.

Because Hamilton has started showing up, and I like him.

I have started paying attention to him when he comes out. Sometimes he tells me he wants things, or he doesn’t want things, or he thinks this could be better than that, and I’ve started listening. It sounds so elementary to say it out loud, but I think that I’m a person, like a whole entire one. The same kind of person Jesus told us to love.

I might be entirely alone here, and that’s okay. But if I’m not, if you have felt some tinge of “yes, that” while reading this, I actually have some advice for you. Give yourself a try.

It’s actually remarkably simple: do unto yourself as you would have yourself do unto others.

Figure out a few things that make you tick. Talk kindly about yourself. Tell yourself something you’re proud of. Look back at the miles you’ve walked, acknowledge the feet that brought you this far, forgive yourself lavishly, do something nice for yourself just because.

The thing it took me 35 years to figure out is that self-care is not selfish, it is setting up a base camp. If you are to love your neighbor as you love yourself, you must first love yourself. Fill up your cup until it is overflowing, and then from that overflow, serve.

If you don’t, you’ll be wholly empty all the time.

And that’s no good for anybody.