how to love yourself and others: some experiments and results | #33

mirrors, snakes, feelings, and emotions

The past month and a half or so I've been thinking a lot about what it means and looks like to love someone. Both myself and others.

I've always winced a bit telling people I loved them. What did that mean? What are they inferring when I tell them that? Like signing a contract that I hadn't read.

The idea of loving myself was foreign. I've always thought of myself as a body and a brain. Sometimes chemicals in my brain make me feel good, so I spend my days trying to find those chemicals again. And that's what life is. Finding chemicals.

"You just know!" "You feel it!" People would tell me. It seemed like an absurd question to most people I asked.

They're right, to be clear. But what I didn't understand is that I was looking for an emotion, not a feeling.

Love is a feeling, not an emotion. At least, that's my current understanding of how this all works. I'll get into the difference soon!

I've done some digging. This issue of The Pole is about my findings so far:

• saying "I love you" to myself in the mirror every day for 100 days (I'm on day 39 right now)

• Reading "Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It" by Kamal Ravikant (I'm halfway through)

  • the 3 kinds of snakes

• Watching various YouTube videos about what love means (this one inspired this newsletter)

100 days of "I love you"

In June 2023 some friends I met at Vibevamp said they were meeting up in San Fransisco in August of 2023.

I liked these folks and I had never been to SF, so I bought a ticket and visited.

It was there that I (re-)met Neil and at some point we were talking about dating and self love. He proposed that we say I love you to ourselves in the mirror every day for 100 days and document it on Twitter.

I'm a sucker for experiments like this, so of course I said yes.

We're currently on Day 39, and it's been interesting.

A lot of the time it's been unremarkable. I said it and felt nothing. No magic or meaning.

Often I've said it and felt resistance. Mostly coming from uncertainty about what I mean when I use those words.

Sometimes I'd feel residue from my relationship with my parents. I'd say it and it felt like checking off a box instead of transmitting a feeling.

Sometimes I'd laugh afterward. Sometimes I'd end up dancing.

On day 22, I asked my friend Tasshin for advice to help me love myself.

He recommended that I read a book called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant.

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

I'm about halfway through the book but it's already influenced how I view love in ways I can't articulate well, yet. But I'll try.

He advocates self-love as a practice that emphasizes habit and awareness.

The best way I can summarize it is with an example from the book. He talks about a psychiatrist trying to cure a patient with an extreme fear of snakes. He was so afraid of them that he would routinely hallucinate them.

The psychiatrist restrained the patient and put him in a room with some real and fake (rubber) snakes.

He asked the patient, thrashing with fear, what he saw. The patient yelled, "SNAKES!"

He then asked him to point out each snake.

What was interesting was that the patient correctly identified the actual snakes. He pointed at the real snakes and avoided pointing at the rubber snakes.

But he also identified hallucinated snakes. He pointed at snakes that weren't there.

The psychiatrist told the patient that these snakes weren't real. After sitting with the fear for a bit, the patient learned to identify which snakes were hallucinations.

When the psychiatrist asked him how he knew which ones were hallucinations, the patient said:

"Because they're transparent. If I focus, I can see the real world behind them."

Now, with this ability to identify hallucinations, the snakes lost their power over him. He was still afraid of snakes, and he still sometimes hallucinated them, but he no longer lived in fear. He would see them for what they are (fake), and then move on.

Ever since then, I've kept an eye out for those 3 different kinds of snakes in my life.

Sometimes they're rubber snakes. Thoughts or ideas that are obviously negative and untrue that I don't need in my life.

Maybe it's a billboard telling me that I won't be cool if I don't have a luxury watch. Maybe it's an aunt or uncle asking if I'm sure I don't want to be a doctor or lawyer.

Sometimes they're real snakes. Thoughts or ideas that are negative, but true. Things I should be aware of and either accept or do something about.

Maybe I did hurt my friend's feelings. Maybe what I'm doing is risky and I have to make peace with that anxiety.

Sometimes they're hallucinated snakes. Negative thoughts that feel true and real at first, but aren't. Things I need to shine more light on. Habits and grooves of thinking that I need to replace with something more kind to myself.

Thoughts like "I'm not good enough." or "I won't succeed."

This book gave me a great way to practice being kind to myself, but I still was in the dark about what love meant.

Love is understanding

I've asked a lot of people what love is, or what it means to them. I've gotten a lot of answers. Roughly, peoples' answers fall into one of these categories:

• it's a feeling, iykyk (if you know, you know)

• it's selfless service (you want someone to be better, succeed, etc)

• it's a state or quality: intimacy, passion, commitment, closeness, attachment

Those all make sense to me, but I always felt like they were gesturing at something bigger.

But then I watched this video, which I resonated with a lot and seems to model the big picture. Here's a summary:

• Often we get into relationships subconsciously. We know we like the way we feel around that person and we're compelled to get close to them.

• Then we try to make another person happy and feel loved, but it doesn't work. We show love, but they don't necessarily receive it. Why?

• Well, what is love?

• Love is to take someting as a part of yourself

• To see it, to feel it, to listen to it, etc to the degree that you fully understand it

• If you want someone to feel loved, stop trying to make them feel loved

• Instead, start trying to understand them

• Metaphor: imagine you love a pet fish, so you pick it up and hug it. But it needs water to breath, so it died.

• If we don't understand someone, we can't know what their best interest is, so we don't know if we're fully compatible with them.

• In any relationship, romantic or otherwise, the goal is that it's in each person's best interest to meet the interests of the other.

• Until we know each other we don't know what incompatibility exists, if any

• How do you understand someone? It's not rocket science. Just like when you were a kid and you became interested in, for example, dinosaurs. What did you do? You got curious and asked questions.

• Hence, you should be around people you are curious about.

• Some incompatibilities will be revealed with some people early on, but for the relationships that stick, it's organic.

• When we fall in love with people we're not curious about (e.g. for egotistical or attachment purposes), we fall in love with an image of them. Thus, our attempts at loving them fall flat.

• But if you know in spectacular detail what someone likes and how they feel loved, loving them is natural and inevitable.

When I apply this reasoning to loving myself, things make a lot more sense.

Saying "I love you" to myself is hallow and meaningless if I don't understand myself.

It's not me trying to make someone feel an emotion. It's not like I tell someone I love you and that stirs up warm fuzzy feelings.

(Although I'm sure that happens sometimes.)

Saying "I love you" is more like a reminder. It's bringing into awareness the fact that someone knows and understands you. That you live in someone else's heart and mind.

It's not meant to be validating. It's not creating an emotion, like happiness or joy.

It's more like gratitude: recalibrating my point of view to the good that is there in front of me. That I am seen. I am not alone. A feeling of resonance.

Do I make an effort to understand myself? Do I know what I want? Do I make an effort to give myself those things? Am I confident that I do?

That's what I'm channeling with my daily "I love you" in the mirror.

If I tell myself I love you and I feel resistance, I'm going to take it to mean some part of me thinks I don't know myself well enough.

Then I'm going to get curious.