Whom are you letting name you?

I recently read the book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I've been rereading parts of it today, mostly the parts I dog-eared or highlighted the first time I read it. (Yeah, sometimes I geek out and highlight sentences or paragraphs that really resonate with me). Out of all of those highlighted paragraphs, this one stood out to me the most today:

Diane noted the concern on my face and responded, smiling and kind. "It's not that bad, Don. Don't worry. It's just that for some reason, you are letting this girl name you."
"What do you mean, name me?"
"Well, you are letting her decide your value, you know. Your value has to come from God. And God wants you to receive His love and to love yourself too."
And what she was saying was true. . . But it also felt wrong. I mean, it felt like it was an arrogant thing to do, to love myself, to receive love. I knew that all the kicking myself around, all the hating myself, was not coming from God, that those voices were not God whispering in my ear, but it felt like I had to listen to them; it felt like I had to believe the voices were telling the truth.

This was from one of the last chapters in the book. He's talking with a friend, telling her about this relationship he's in and how he really likes this girl he's seeing, how he thinks about her all the time, and yet it is hard. The relationship is hard because he's so afraid of letting her down, he's so afraid that she doesn't really want to be with him, even though she says she does. And the above excerpt is his friend's response to Don after he asks if there's something wrong with how he's feeling.

This past week has kind of sucked for me. I'm getting really burned out on grad school, but that's not all that was bothering me. There was Valentine's Day. Blah. I hate that I let it get to me this year. I'm supposed to be stronger than that, right? Hear me roar and be empowered and, like, not care or something. Roar, darn it, ROAR!

Not so much.

So I wrote the "You are loved" post for Valentine's mostly as a way to remind myself (and friends) that my/our true worth should not be dependent on someone else. And I felt better. For about an hour. Then those destructive thoughts crept in.

First there was the reminder that I don't have a boyfriend on Valentine's Day, which of course reminded me that I very recently went through a breakup, because I almost forgot about that but not really. Those reminders are always such fun.

It didn't take long before the self-defeating thoughts spiraled out of control into an all-out pity party: "You suck at relationships. . . You need to lose weight before you even think of dating anyone again. . . He never really cared about you. . . You're better off alone; you don't need anybody. . . Sometimes you snort when you laugh and it's weird. . ."

It was like getting a really bad song stuck in my head all day, like an odd hybrid of country-western and emo, but even worse because I was the one writing the lyrics. I almost managed to get it out of my head as I was looking at the pretty red tulips my mom gave me (tulips are my favorite flowers, but no, I wouldn't call myself a Calvinist) and then I heard it say, "Nobody has ever given you flowers except your mom, and she has to love you because you're her daughter."

Oh, snap!

I pouted about this for a couple seconds and stopped enjoying the tulips and wondered why nobody I dated before brought me flowers and then I realized the voice was wrong about this one. Aha! I did too get flowers, once. I was on a first date with this guy a couple years ago and he gave me roses. But the date didn't go so well and I wasn't feeling it (at all), so when he asked me out again I told him that I just didn't feel a connection there and he was really disappointed and told me that he thought I was wrong and that we were perfect for each other, which kind of freaked me out because we had just met like a week before. But the point was that I got flowers from someone other than my mom. So there, mean voice in my head! You're wrong! Ha!

But that voice didn't give up so easily. It's a crafty little bugger. While I was still gloating from my victory, it reminded me of how I was too much of a wuss to tell that guy to his face that I wasn't interested in him. Yeah, I told him over email and felt like such a jerk for doing that. Then mean-voice pointed out that I'm a hypocrite because someone once broke up with me via email (although it was a bit more involved than one date) and I was soooo hurt by that, and yet I've done the same thing to someone else.

Ouch.

The spiral kept going throughout the day, and I managed to ignore it most of the time, but the underlying theme of all of those thoughts was that I pretty much suck. Nice, eh?

So, going back to the book excerpt: why was I letting this holiday name me, letting it decide my value? Why was I allowing such unloving thoughts to rummage around my mind?

And it wasn't just some silly holiday that I was letting decide my value. It was harmful messages from our culture that I sometimes buy into about what it means to be lovable and attractive and accepted. It was my past mistakes and hurts. It was my perceptions of how certain other people felt about me. It was my own perfectionism and skewed definition of what it means to be perfect, along with this absurd idea that the only way to be loved is to be perfect, as if love were so conditional that it could be taken away with one flaw, one mistake.

I wish I could write that I am always strong and unaffected by outside influences. I would feel so much wiser if I could say how much I've got it all together and figured out, and that nothing fazes me. "Roar!" But I'm still growing. I'm still learning what it really means to be loved, and, even harder for me sometimes, how to accept and receive that love. Why is it so hard sometimes to truly and completely accept love from God, from others, from myself? And when I think I've finally muffled that mean voice for good and haven't heard from it for days or weeks or months, how does it somehow manage to turn up the volume again when I'm having a rough day and the last thing I need is to get caught in that spiral?

The weird thing is, I am much kinder to myself, overall, than I used to be. Most of the time. Some days are better than others, clearly. And sometimes, like this week, I start to feel myself slipping back into my old perfectionist ways, especially when I'm really stressed. But then I'll catch myself. Or, more likely, God will catch me and get my attention somehow, whether it be through a sermon, words of loving concern from someone, a powerful message in a song or movie, a bible verse, or a passage in a book that I feel compelled to dog-ear or highlight and come back to again when I need some encouragement. So, today I am grateful for those words in that book. And I'm grateful for God's unconditional love that never gives up on me, even when I sometimes feel like giving up on myself.

A couple pages later, Miller writes about how this girl he liked so much broke up with him and how he started to once again berate himself, but that something stopped those voices:

The sentiment was simple: Love your neighbor as yourself. And I thought about that for a second and wondered why God would put that phrase so strongly in my mind . . . He was saying that I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talked to myself, and that somehow I had come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself . . . I wouldn't receive love because it felt so wrong. It didn't feel humble, and I knew I was supposed to be humble. But that was all crap, and it didn't make any sense. If it is wrong for me to receive love, then it is also wrong for me to give it because by giving it I am causing somebody else to receive it, which I had presupposed was the wrong thing to do. So I stopped. I stopped hating myself. It no longer felt right. It wasn't manly or healthy, and I cut it out.