You were worthy of love.

I read this on a sign last night, one of those cute reminders written in chalk all over city sidewalks, and thought of how not so cute or little of a reminder it actually was.

It felt revolutionary. It made me stop. We’re so used to being told that we are worthy of love by posts and books and people trying to inspire on the internet. We’re supposed to love who we are for the sake of who we are becoming. That covers present and future tense.

But what about the past? What about who you were? How do you treat that person in your mind?

WHO YOU WERE

I, like most people, cringe at the various selves I have been throughout my life. I’ve always taken this as a positive sign that I must be constantly improving. I would look at old photos or remember things that I used to say or do and feel so far from that person. Granted, I’m twenty-one, so we’re really only working with childhood and adolescence here which, to be fair, are carnivals of embarrassment for the best of us.

It’s a right of passage to cringe at old memories from high school, an immediate reflex to mock that old version of ourselves, if only to prove that we are not that person anymore, that we have grown and matured and must surely be better now, right? We put down our previous self, as if that person is not still just right under our new and improved layer of skin. It’s our natural way.

But what if it wasn’t?

What if we changed that?

In all of the times that I have replayed memories and cringed at photos and gone over the events of my life, it has never occurred to me maybe nothing was wrong with me after all. That maybe I wasn’t a disaster, an emotional wreck, a crazed kid who loved too much and in all of the wrong places—maybe I was just fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen.

Almost always, when I think of those years and what they carried for me, how people treated me or didn’t treat me, I find myself taking their side. I think, oh, well, yeah. I mean, I was being totally clingy and not cool at all, no wonder they did that.

Which, that stupidly brilliant little sign made me realize, is really just another way of saying I was totally unworthy of love. I deserved everything that happened to me.

HEARTBREAK

You wouldn’t know it from the smile on my face, but the photo above was taken in 2020, while I was, as is evidenced by the impulsively trimmed bangs, still just learning to breathe again after a year of unparalleled heartbreak.

I remember saving it because the joy I felt in this moment felt like a victory after months and months of watching the pandemic flip my world upside down, stealing things no one told me that I needed to hold onto. I was a walking personification of grief throughout all of them. It didn’t help that I happened to also go through my first real romantic break up that year, an experience that gutted me. And while every other thing I grieved that year felt far more vast, we’ll focus on the break up for thematic purposes.

I was in pieces.

I was literally on the floor, pressing my forehead to it, riding out the waves of grief as they came and went all summer long. I had known pain, but I had never known that. It’s a unique thing to get left on a street corner in the middle of a global pandemic by someone that you barely liked, but clung to for reasons you cannot even remember.

All I can remember now is staring out of a car window that I never should have been in with someone who meant everything to me because he told me I was pretty—pretty—and watching a plane land over the city skyline. I both did and did not know that he would be gone a day later. I both did and did not know that I should have left weeks beforehand.

That part still haunts me and probably always will. I carry it around like a scar, reminding me not to play with fire.

HEALING

It hurt me so deeply and so badly that the only consolation was time and the distance it carried me from it all. From him, from the pain, but really, from who I was. The more time that passed, the easier it was to accept how he left. Having had a chance to grow into more, it became easier to accept that he must have left because I was not enough.

That could make sense. I could make that make sense.

I could read the books and the poems and believe that I had become someone worthy of love, but no one said anything about that girl staring out of the car window. She was gone, why did it matter?

Reading that sign, I understood why.

I understood as soon as my shoulders relaxed and the breath left my lungs that carrying around the weight of someone’s else’s decisions, telling yourself that you are to blame for each one of them, is exhausting. It felt like a small revolution to try the words out on my tongue:

You were worthy of love. You did not deserve what happened.

It just happened anyway.

All of those months spent going over everything in my head, dissecting what I did and didn’t do, isolating variables like some lab experiment, were futile. They felt so important at the time, like vital research.

I made the girl that I was into a martyr. I crucified her in my own mind as an example of what can happen. Her tears were those with which I used like holy water to baptize myself and be born again.

HOW TO HAVE GRACE

It makes me so angry now. It breaks my heart all over again to realize that I spent years thinking I was not worthy of decency. That I deserved what happened to me. That it was my own fault. That I should have known better, should have known the things that I know now.

I’m learning to think about it like this:

When I was a toddler, I touched the red-hot surface of a stove fireplace at my grandmother’s house. Everyone really freaked out about this for reasons I only understood as the pain met my nerves an instant later. It was a stupid thing to do, but how could I have known that yet?

The point being, I don’t make fun of that little girl in my mind. I don’t berate her for not yet knowing that fire is hot, that it burns everything it touches. But for some reason, I have been reluctant to extend that same grace to my teenage self. I think we all do this. It takes reading little letters scrawled by some poet on a city sidewalk to even realize it.

All to say, I’m learning that self-love is not just about who you are right now.

It’s also about every person you have ever been, for they are still a part of you. They are your foundation, the atoms that make up who you are today. Bullying them is like yelling at that little girl who was only reaching out for something that looked beautiful and bright, not yet knowing what it feels like to be burned.

I’m trying all the time to remember that.

Love, m.

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