With love, Love...
Why self-love never feels like love while you're doing it.
I lay there in the dark of my hotel room, somewhere in middle America. I opened one eye, careful not to wake all the way up, and looked at the clock beside the bed. 3:14 a.m. I settled back into my collection of pillows, some of them borrowed from the second bed. And started thinking. Planning.
My brain had been running the numbers for months and kept coming back with a verdict. My heart kept asking for more time.
“Your brain and your heart are not friends.”
I heard that years ago and I’ve never been able to put it down.
Growing up, the love I was taught to show pointed outward. Love your parents. Love your grandparents. Love your siblings. Love your friends. Love that special person in your life. Nobody ever mentioned the other one. The one I thought I knew. My actions said otherwise.
I can find the words for other people. I’ve spent years doing it: telling someone they deserve better, telling someone their boundaries are allowed to exist, telling someone that leaving isn’t the same as failing. And I mean every word of it. I just never thought to say any of it to myself.
For most of my life I assumed that when the brain and the heart disagree, the heart is the honest one. That’s what we’re told. “Follow your heart,” they say. The heart knows. The brain is the accountant and the heart is the truth-teller, and any decision that comes from the head must be missing something.
But then I look back at what I just wrote. That the love I was taught pointed outward. And it stops sitting right.
Because if that’s true, my heart is not some neutral instrument. My heart went to school. It was trained, early and thoroughly, in one direction: towards everyone else. So when it speaks up at 3:14 in the morning and asks for more time, I have to at least consider that it isn’t wisdom talking.
It might just be obedience.
And the brain, running its numbers in the background for months, coming back with the same verdict—maybe that isn’t coldness. Maybe that’s the only part of me that ever learned to count my own cost.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to flip the cliché and call it insight. The brain isn’t kind. It’s just correct. Being correct about yourself and being good to yourself are not the same thing. I have diagnosed my own life with perfect accuracy and not moved an inch.
So it isn’t as simple as switching sides.
What I keep coming back to is the body.
The body doesn’t argue. It keeps the record. The tightness before you say yes to something. The exhaustion you decide is normal. The way you can be standing in a room and know, physically, that you should not be in it. The body has been filing these reports the whole time.
The brain reads them.
The heart overrules them.
And I have spent a long time calling that overruling love.
English hands me one word for all of this, which is part of the trouble. Love. Four letters, doing the work of about nine different things.
The Greeks split it up. The one they kept for love of self is philautia. Aristotle went back and forth on it: he thought there was a version that curdles into self-obsession, and a version that’s the root everything else grows out of.
Twenty-four hundred years ago they were already arguing about whether self-love was allowed.
I find that oddly comforting. Not because it settles anything. Because it means the confusion isn’t mine alone, and it isn’t new.
Here’s where I’ve landed, for now.
Self-love is elusive because it never feels like love while you’re doing it. It feels like disappointing someone. It feels like the wrong answer. It feels like the cold, calculating, unromantic part of you winning an argument it had no business winning.
It doesn’t arrive warm. It arrives as a decision made at 3:14 in the morning, in the dark, in a room that isn’t yours, with your heart still asking for more time.
I don’t know yet whether I can trust a heart that was trained to point at everyone else.
But I’m learning to hear when it’s the one talking.
With love,
Love