The second lesson is another one which I mistakenly (and arrogantly) thought I had learned without doing any real work - the importance of self-love. This one I have been kicked with a few times - I have to learn it in stages. The first error was thinking that since I was happy, and everything seemed to be going my way, that I must have learned to love myself. Wrong! When I met S., I was riding a wave of mania: my reserves of self-esteem seemed boundless, my insecurities completely inevident. I felt neither lonely nor desperate, and as a result I did not notice when I committed to an inappropriate relationship with someone who was so obviously selfish and dysfunctional. My need for external validation trumped my instincts which told me that her love for me was disingenuous. I ignored the warning signs, even when others pointed them out to me, and I clearly still did not like myself enough at the time to permit myself to let that train go past and wait for the next one. The results were disastrous: a slow, steady, relentless, unwavering, inexorable and unarrestable descent back into self-loathing and depression, from which there was no escape for either of us other than painful separation.
But even after all that, when I first broke up with S., I was going around telling people that I felt like I finally understood the importance of loving oneself and the danger of looking outside oneself for the solution to loneliness -- but I still did not actually get it!
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