Can some people really have a talent for being loved?
I saw this quite of Tana French going around and it made me question it.
How can anyone have a talent for anything like that? Does it mean that they are more love-able for simply existing? Does it mean their personality makes them easier to be loved?
Does it also mean that some people aren’t good at it and never will? How can you really be love-able? Does it mean being carefree? Wearing your heart on your sleeve?
Is this a way to justify that some people are so hard to love, they basically shouldn’t expect it?
Or is it like when people say that “nobody will love you if you don’t love yourself first”? Or “you can’t really love others if you don’t love yourself”? Both are statements that people tend to say a lot.
I’d rather stand with Laura Snelling, Matt Joseph Diaz, Bethany Smith and others.
People shouldn’t have to love themselves to deserve love. If you have a mental illness, then it’s so much harder. If you went through dark shit, then it can be so difficult to even see yourself in a good light. If you see bullied, gaslighted, or treated in ways that weren’t okay. If you didn’t really experience love...
Does it make it easier? Probably. Mainly because If you think you deserve stuff, it’s easier to set boundaries; you can be firm and say no without feeling guilty.
But if you can’t truly and honestly love yourself, that shouldn’t mean you can’t be loved by anyone else, or that you can’t love.
That message is terribly harming, yet people keep repeating it all the time.
No one that has any kind of mental health issues choose to have them, and “getting over them” is hard and can be the work of a life time; so repeatedly telling them that they can’t be loved or love unless they love themselves first, it means that they should loose hope.
When you are at the bottom of the pool, you don’t really think one day you’ll be able to float.
And being told that you don’t deserve love until you manage to fix yourself ... it’s not true.
Everybody deserves love, right?
And can’t you learn to love yourself by being loved and by loving someone else?