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Self Love
a year ago
I’ve always struggled with self-love. Growing up, love was conditional on me behaving according to my parent’s ideals: keeping quiet, hiding emotion, and always striving to become the well-rounded breadwinner I was meant to be as someone assigned male at birth. Loving myself became increasingly difficult; I was constantly told how I should behave, what I should like, who I should be friends with or fall in love with, and what I should do with my future. Guilt and self-loathing set when I found no passion in life, failed to live up to expectations, and was always pushed to do more things I didn’t want to do.
I never learned what I enjoyed beyond escapist activities like playing video games or watching TV because I was only encouraged to do things my family enjoyed or things that would eventually make me more money. Living in the shadow of my older sibling’s talent, expressing my creativity was difficult; I didn’t learn I enjoyed writing or that I’m a wonderful world builder until it was just a time wasting hobby. Discovering my interest in consensual BDSM only made me feel more like a black sheep; in addition to being the one who used corporal punishment, my mother didn’t respect my privacy and labeled me the deviant when she discovered that interest. Because of my experience with punishment, I never considered I might enjoy submitting, being restrained, or pain play; I confined myself to hurting my partners, which often added to my guilt.
It wasn’t until I started cutting off my family and living away from their expectations that I could discover who I was. It still took 27 years to give up engineering, 29 to accept I’m a woman and a lesbian, 30 to cut off the last of my family and become a writer, and 31 to have my first consensual submissive experience. I’ll be 32 in a few days and I’m still learning what love means to me; loving myself only became possible a few years ago so I’m still undoing a great deal of self-loathing. It’s hard to be forgiving when I have a bad day and I feel guilt when I don’t live up to my own expectations, much less those that I don’t hold myself to anymore. I’m learning to accept my flaws and idiosyncrasies, though, and I know I can love the woman I was always meant to be.
I never learned what I enjoyed beyond escapist activities like playing video games or watching TV because I was only encouraged to do things my family enjoyed or things that would eventually make me more money. Living in the shadow of my older sibling’s talent, expressing my creativity was difficult; I didn’t learn I enjoyed writing or that I’m a wonderful world builder until it was just a time wasting hobby. Discovering my interest in consensual BDSM only made me feel more like a black sheep; in addition to being the one who used corporal punishment, my mother didn’t respect my privacy and labeled me the deviant when she discovered that interest. Because of my experience with punishment, I never considered I might enjoy submitting, being restrained, or pain play; I confined myself to hurting my partners, which often added to my guilt.
It wasn’t until I started cutting off my family and living away from their expectations that I could discover who I was. It still took 27 years to give up engineering, 29 to accept I’m a woman and a lesbian, 30 to cut off the last of my family and become a writer, and 31 to have my first consensual submissive experience. I’ll be 32 in a few days and I’m still learning what love means to me; loving myself only became possible a few years ago so I’m still undoing a great deal of self-loathing. It’s hard to be forgiving when I have a bad day and I feel guilt when I don’t live up to my own expectations, much less those that I don’t hold myself to anymore. I’m learning to accept my flaws and idiosyncrasies, though, and I know I can love the woman I was always meant to be.
