Leave No Part of You Unloved

Before you try to love any part of someone else, try to love every part of yourself.

We waited more than two decades to watch our wedding video.

Finally, on the night of our twenty-third anniversary, we pushed play. There were a number of obvious reasons for our delay:

• We were broke when we got married, so we hired the cheapest videographer we could find, and the quality of the recording reflects that.

• We had our first kid less than two years later, while we were still graduate students, and when you’re on food stamps you don’t have much time for a stroll down memory lane.

• Until last year, the video was on VHS, and we sold our last VCR at a yard sale more than a decade ago.

However, perhaps the truer reason for the delay is that, for decades, I was unable to witness who I was at age twenty-four.

Until now, I didn’t love myself enough to see myself.

The video begins with a grainy image of the church and then, suddenly, there they are: the bride and groom. The bride is exactly as luminous as I remember her.

And the groom is exactly as awkward as I remember him.

At times he’s stiff and scared, trying to please everyone as if that were possible. At other times he’s tender and teary, in part because he actually feels it, and in part because he believes that’s how a good groom is supposed to feel. He doesn’t give a speech at the reception because he doesn’t know it’s an option, something he’ll regret a month later when he watches another groom deliver one at an another wedding. He’s rude to his wife’s friends on the dance floor, because he wants to dance with his own friends.

To borrow a word from my kids, that young man is cringey.

“Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus taught. But what does it mean to actually love yourself?

I suspect Jesus answered that by also encouraging us to become like little children again. Children love themselves in an unselfconscious, unquestioning way—they exist, therefore they are loveable. Duh.

Then, stuff happens, and loving yourself gets more complicated:

• You become ashamed of the things you don’t love about yourself.

• You try to hide the things you don’t love about yourself.

• You angrily project the things you don’t love about yourself.

• You arrogantly ignore the things you don’t love about yourself.

• You admit to and try to fix the things you don’t love about yourself.

• You hope to heal the things you don’t love about yourself.

• You regret all the yous that you were before you started healing.

Only after I began opening my heart toward everything happening around me and within me could I start loving myself more freely, like a tree.

A tree grows a new ring for each year it lives, and we’re all like trees—every previous rendition of us is like a ring in the tree of who we are. Dendrochronologists can tell a great deal about what a tree has been through by looking at a cross-section of the tree and the rings it reveals. Wider rings mean cooler and wetter seasons of life. Narrow rings mean hotter and dryer. You can see traumas, such as forest fires, in the rings of a tree.

But a tree doesn’t become a tree by healing its rings or changing its rings or removing its rings.

A tree becomes itself by being the sum total of its rings. A tree inhabits its full tree-ness when it simply stands there and sways, all of its rings making it possible to withstand the wind.

Loving ourselves means loving every ring we’ve ever been.

A friend of mine recently won a most valuable participant award at an annual men’s conference and was invited to give an acceptance speech.

“I showed up here authentically and vulnerably,” he said, “and I love myself for that. However, a part of me also feels ashamed because I don’t think I deserve this award.”

He took a long pause. You could hear a pin drop.

“I love that part of me too,” he said.

He wasn’t done.

“There’s also a part of me that feels anxious, because I think I’ve got to live up to this from now on. I love that part of me too. And there’s a part of me that feels like I’m better than you all because I won this award. I love that part of me too. And there’s a part of me that thinks this means I have it all figured out now. I love that part of me too.”

He went on and on, loving every ring.

When you can love every version of you—for who you needed to be in order to weather that season of life—there is no part of you left out of your love.

The twenty-fourth ring of me was cringey.

And I love that part of me too.

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Before you try to love any part of someone else, try to love every part of yourself.

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