Borderline Impossible.

You deserve love, even if you haven’t found it for yourself. You can be loved, even if only by someone else. You can love someone, even if you despise the person you believe yourself to be.

The idea that you must love yourself in order to love others or to be loved has a catchy ring to it, but it’s stupid and harmful and a myth. (I tried to find a more poetic verbiage but using it would be disingenuous, because “stupid and harmful” is simply the most accurate way to put it.) It can leave us feeling helpless and hopeless, where we resign our dreams for the future to loneliness, because we’re just not loving ourselves, or loving ourselves enough, or loving ourselves correctly. It is especially distressing if you’re struggling with Borderline Personality Disorder, where that instinct for self-hatred can be so thunderously loud and the experience of emotions so overwhelming.

And, because it likes to keep things interesting, BPD adds an additional layer to this quandary: your sense of self can be so unstable. Who you understand yourself to be today may feel totally differently tomorrow, may change based on who you’re spending time with or even your location or the time of day. It’s a daunting requirement that someone who does not feel settled in who they are, find a way to love that transient being, otherwise they’re destined for lovelessness. Most of us wouldn’t use the word “love” to describe our feelings toward a stranger, so if you’re a stranger to yourself, where does that leave you? What’s the point of treatment or change if a connected life requires you to love yourself (tall enough order on its own), and you don’t even know who that is?

When you’re ready, it’s all possible. Therapy should be an opportunity for you to learn more about yourself and gain a greater sense of that identity certainty, not because it’s required to be loved or for you to love anyone else, but because life is a lot easier that way.

I would love for you to love yourself. What a victory it would be. And it’s totally okay if you’re not there right now, and totally okay if you don’t quite get there, and totally okay if it’s not even your goal. Loving yourself is not a criterion for connection; you can know yourself, and you can have that loving life. And isn’t that ultimately the point?