The words aren’t flowing this morning, it’s difficult to drag them out from where they’re hiding. My shoulders ache from hunching over the keyboard, I roll them and they crack and groan. Maybe I’ll book myself in for a massage, an indulgence, but why not?
The question I woke with, was: why is it so hard to believe that somebody likes you? I’ll rephrase that, because I don’t know whether it’s just me. Why do I find it so hard to believe that somebody likes me? And how might this seem to them, whoever they are? A lack of trust, perhaps? But it comes from insecurity, this assumption that they don’t care, not directed at them, but at myself, this assumption that I’m not loveable.
How do we learn to love ourselves? How do we learn not to? What is it that drives out those feelings of warmth and caring? I can’t think back now, to put myself into the mind of the child I was. I believe, intellectually, when I think about it, that I was loved, just as I love my own children. But I can’t say I remember feeling loved. Do I feel loved now? I feel my daughter’s love, the one human being in the world who every says ‘I love you’. My husband? I guess he still loves me, there again, he has never told me so in so many words, it has always been something I have had to take on trust, assume that he wanted me, as much as, at one time, I wanted him.
I suppose I have always had this ambivalent relationship with being loved. My first husband loved me – or said he loved me – in an oppressive way which made me feel – well, if that’s how he feels, I guess I should love him back, and I tried to convince myself, even though even from the earliest times I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. By comparison, perhaps, the restraint and silences of my current husband came as a relief.
I have female friends (non-english ones) who seem to love me extravagantly, in ways I find hard to understand, I have to take their affection on trust, because it seems implausible, I don’t see in myself the qualities which I assume they must see in me, they seem deluded in some way. Although I’m always grateful for this kind of attention, it doesn’t seem authentic, because I don’t understand where it comes from, and so I’m wary of accepting it in case it will suddenly be withdrawn – when they realise I’m not worthy or I don’t deserve it.