Of Highlight Reels and Whitney Houston

 

I had a rather unpleasant encounter this past weekend.

I don't wanna go into too much detail cuz I've been reliving it for the past four days or so and I'm ready to try to let it go and move on. But it involved me getting yelled at for lustfully leering at a young woman in the Wally World parking lot when all I did was acknowledge I saw her before moving out of her way.

More important was the thought process I went through after the incident. At first, I was super pissed at Mormons cuz, in my experience, Mormons are super hung up on shallow, external qualities and equally prejudiced against older single people. After all, Brigham Young once allegedly said any unmarried male over the age of 27 is a menace to society and I'm not exactly well-known for possessing good looks or a strong sense of style. In that light, it completely makes sense that young Mormon women might think that older single males constantly have ill intentions in their minds.

Driving home, I realized that there's no way to tell someone isn't married just by looking at them. Unless you look for and cannot see a wedding ring, there aren't many outward signs and even then, people working on their homes or in their yards might take off their rings off to avoid damaging them. So, my harasser wasn't doing so because I'm old and single. It was because I'm old, not handsome and kinda creepy. Great. That's so fucking much better.

Once I got home, I sat down and began scrolling Instagram, hoping to settle down and put the incident to the back of my mind. Image after image of people living their best lives rolled by. Vacation pics from exotic locales. Christmas trees festooned in lights and ribbons, surrounded by giant piles of presents. Beautiful young people having fun, being in love and celebrating with their nearest and dearest. I was already feeling shitty about myself and seeing all these photos full of beauty and revelry made me feel even lower.

 Just when I was at my lowest, I remembered the only New Year's resolution I made this year: to learn to love myself. Well, that and I remembered Whitney Houston.

In 1985, pop singer Whitney Houston recorded a cover version of the song "Greatest Love of All," originally written for a 1977 Muhammad Ali biopic. The song is about learning to love oneself and how important learning that skill is. There's also some jibber-jabber about children being our future and stuff. But loving yourself is the main thing.

I dunno why I thought of Whitney Houston's self-love power ballad. It's a pretty horrible song, truth be told, all syrupy cloying lyrics and overblown orchestration. But inside all of that, there's a message that actually has a lot of weight behind it.

Loving yourself is the foundation of a happy, successful life. Everything else is built on that. A healthful relationship doesn't happen without loving yourself first. A flourishing career is a pipe dream without loving yourself enough to push for what you feel you deserve. Pursuing hobbies isn't something one does if one doesn't love oneself enough to go after creative fulfillment.

Loving yourself gets a lot harder when you have people you don't know screeching at you for things you did not do. It gets harder when you live amongst extremely judgemental, narrow-minded asshats. And it gets much harder when you compare the totality of your own life with the highlights reels of other people's lives. 

Talking with a dear friend, I expressed my frustration and lack of knowledge about where to start my effort to learn self-love. She said "write down three things you can do to learn to love yourself right now." After some thought about my weekend, I've come up with a couple things I want to work on in the immediate future.

1. Stop comparing my life to what I see on other people's social media. Facebook, Instagram and all those other apps are useful to keep up with loved ones and share the things you care about. But social media can shred your soul if you see the cool things others are doing in their lives and start beating yourself up cuz you're not living as exciting a life. Remember, most people live unspectacularly most of the time and only share what they want you to see. That doesn't mean your life sucks any more than theirs. It just means you're more open about the reality of your life.
2. Stop caring about what people who don't know me think. A lot of people who know me make incorrect assumptions about me all the time. For example, I get the feeling that most people who know me think the only movies I like are comic book movies, Star Wars, and other big franchises. The truth is that I love all kinds of different movies, from artsy weird movies to little indie films and crazy foreign flicks about murderous monster sushi. The point is that even a lot of people who know me, don't really know me as well as they think. If they don't know me, how could anyone who I've never had a conversation with know me? And if people don't know me, then why the fuck should I care what they think?
3. Spend more time with good people. I spend a lot of time by myself. A lot of time. Too much time. One of the things I get jealous of is photos people post of them out with their friends having a good time. Social anxiety makes being social tiring and I avoid it as often as possible. But that leads to loneliness, anger and self-loathing. Is that preferable to being stressed from being out with cool people? Fuck no, it's not! So while I don't think becoming a social butterfly overnight is the right idea, I do need to start out slow, stop declining invitations and get out there and let myself shine. Cuz I'm pretty sparkly when I let myself shine.

Maybe this stuff seems obvious to you. Truth be told, I've kicked each of these ideas around before. But you have to start your journey into self-love somewhere. This seems as good a place as any to start.