Love, Actually, Is All Around
February is known for many things: Black History Month, Lunar New Year, Presidents’ Day, and Groundhog Day (there’s to be an early spring this year, from what I understand). But none of these fill the Target holiday aisles faster than Valentine’s Day, despite its dreadful origin stories: NPR’s “The Dark Origin of Valentine’s Day” is worth a skim.
A lot of us got into medicine because of certain kinds of love: love of science, the love of a challenge, or wanting to help people (which can be a little “L” love as opposed to big, grand, directed-at-one-person-at-a-time big “L” love). Somewhere along the way, all of that love becomes rote since it’s just how we do what needs to be done. It ceases to be unique until something unbelievable brings it to the forefront. A drug comes via compassionate use accommodation, and the moribund patient has a turn-around. After months of struggling, a board exam is passed. A parent donates a kidney so that their child may live without dialysis. These examples of love are great but few and far between. If we wait for significant expressions of love to feel good about what we do, it can be easy to slide into a deep, dark place, sometimes such that even the prominent expressions of love fail to make a mark on our brains. Or hearts.
One solution is to notice that love, actually, is all around. I see you for everyone who read that hearing Hugh Grant’s voice. His opening monologue of Love, Actually brings me to tears every single time. I’m hearing him say, “When the planes hit the Twin Towers…” as I write this, and I can feel my lower lids swelling up just a bit. To spend more time out of the dark-and-twisty headspace, the move may be mindfulness and noticing the little lovely things in the mundane: the warmth of the water as you wash your hands, the feeling of a parasympathetic response after a big sigh. We’re priming our brains to look for “the good,” a worthwhile undertaking given our evolutionarily preserved negativity bias.
But there’s something more radical, especially for those in medicine who got to where we are with self-flagellation and hustling lest our imposter syndrome catches up with us. And it can always be with us, not requiring anything outside of us to happen, no warm water, no sigh, no parent-donated kidney. It’s unconditional self-love. I don’t write this lightly. Unconditional self-love is a practice every single waking minute of every single day. And for me, I couldn't even see glimpses of it until I did a lot of work to get myself from constant self-loathing to reasonably frequent self-neutrality and then to near-constant self-like. Self-love is more challenging to achieve because liking myself still comes with conditions. I feel that I am “allowed” to like myself if I do all of the right things: wake up early to exercise, make a reasonable go at my appearance, only eat meals (and not eat solely out of anxiety, frustration, or boredom), get to bed at an early hour with absolutely no bedtime revenge procrastination. If I miss even one of those metrics, the well-worn path of self-flagellation lights up in my brain, and I wobble from my commitment to liking myself. Liking myself sounds excellent, but I’ve just dressed my perfectionism in an outfit that’s currently more socially acceptable, given the apparent demise of hustle culture. On the other hand, unconditional self-love is a practice of loving myself even when I don’t like myself very much. Skip a workout? Hmmmm…I see what happened there. I can forgo the inner cattle prod (and the grasping for explanations, excuses, and justifications) and feel the disappointment of not living up to the expectations I had for myself that morning. Once I’ve allowed myself to feel that hurt, it eases up, and I can decide how to move forward. Do I want to find a spot for a workout later in the day? Do I want to re-evaluate my AM workout goals, given they might be impractical right now? There’s a gentle self-love there, a feeling of endearment. There are other ways to get things done than browbeating myself into doing them.
The people who really have this figured out describe having fierce self-love. They take ultimate responsibility for all of their emotions and actions to chart the course of their lives. Fierce self-love comes from within and does not require the approval of others. It is not to be confused with arrogance: arrogance is a form of self-love that comes from making other people feel less than they are. I want fierce self-love for people who are doing good things for themselves and others but may see the odds stacked against them. I want those people to feel so sure of themselves, buoyed by such conviction that they make a difference in the world, that they keep going despite setbacks. People with fierce self-love believe so profoundly in themselves that they don’t need reminders that love is all around them because it is in them. And those people have a love that radiates out of them, embracing everyone lucky enough to be paying attention so that they feel loved, too.
Maybe I can become somebody with fierce self-love. Maybe having Valentine’s Day reminders all around me can prompt me to check in with my unconscious thoughts, notice opportunities to give myself credit where it’s due, and lovingly re-direct myself when I know I could do better. I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes…