Since my last post, meandering through the question of whether being loyal to my own needs is enough to count as loving myself, I’ve had the chance to find a more complete answer.
I had something in my life fall away that I grieved to lose.
And, in journaling through my sadness and whether it had all been worth the emotional cost, the question came up: “What if this was the price you paid to become yourself?”
My instinctive and unequivocal answer was, “Then it was worth it. NO price is too high to pay for myself.”
No price is too high to pay for myself.
Wow. Talk about clarity!
I realized in that declaration that I have a fierce devotion to my own Becoming. I will be everything that I am; I will be my full self, and I will become that fully expressed woman because I choose to. Because I choose myself, over and over and over again. I choose myself even when it costs me things I dearly wanted or highly valued. I choose myself even when it causes me to follow a narrative most people in my life don’t understand. I honor the sacrifices and scars of all the past versions of myself by continuing this path to expose and express my true self in as pure and unadulterated a way as possible.
I choose myself enough to set down defenses which my mind swears mean death to dismantle; I choose myself by facing the terror of being open and undefended, and seeing what will happen.
I even choose myself enough to change. To let the experiences I have shift my perspectives and inspire me to realign my way of being. I can grow toward yet another iteration of myself. That does not make this iteration less real or less me. It just means I changed.
And this “I choose myself” works for me as a principle, too. Part of my “me-ness” includes ethics for how I wish to show up in the world and with others. This principle of choosing myself is not selfish in the sense of disregarding others’ needs, but only in disregarding others’ expectations of me. If someone wants me to be less, or different, or more, then I need to choose myself and not them. I do not owe them any power over me, and, in fact, I do a disservice to them by allowing them to disregard my needs and well-being for their own comfort or convenience.
Perhaps this does not sound very much like love, but to me love is choosing. Love is a principle and an action as much as it is a feeling. Love centers well-being and growth over liking and comfort. Like a responsible parent, an act of love gives what is needed – regardless of what is wanted.
I choose myself? Therefore I love myself. How strange I never knew that before.
The Pattern Breaker 
Life with other people requires compromise. That is balanced by self-centered love. Getting the mixture right is the work of a lifetime, and we never quite will.
Life with chronic illness requires another set of compromises, many forced: there are only so many things you can choose from, when you can’t do most and they all take too much energy.
It seems all I do IS compromise. Must be nice to be able to choose to do all the wonderful things people write about – all I see are the many things I’ve had to give up – and how hard it is to even choose to use what I have left for what I really want to do: continue writing fiction.
Is it worth it? I hope so, because the opposite, a life of sybaritic pleasure, isn’t really an option. The writing can at least be a legacy when all other attempts to create one have failed.
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When your body is making choices for you, or limiting severely what you have to choose between, it makes a huge impact! I was having a conversation with someone recently about “choosing me at the expense of myself” – the sense that time and energy are finite, and sometimes working on the big project means over-extending the physical body, and sometimes honoring the needs of the physical body means letting go of ambitions and ideals.
Hugs. And FWIW I believe in your writing and understand the choice to put your limited resources into it!!!
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The kicker is that, before I got sick at 40 (long story), I read so much my standards are unbelievably high – it was the biggest problem when I started writing, that distance between what you want to write, and what your critical mind tells you you have managed to write.
Fortunately, and a quarter of a century having gone by, the vast majority of that is learnable.
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