How Do You Find Self-Worth When You Don’t Like Yourself?

My friend Michael Rohrer writes:

Being desired is such a basic craving. We all want to be desired: by our family, by our friends, by a lover, by our coworkers. What happens when we don’t desire ourselves?

I’m beginning to realize that I don’t like myself very much. All these years of feeling like I couldn’t raise the eyebrow or pique the interest of an attractive man might actually stem from the fact that I’m exuding the pheromones of one who feels unworthy of being loved and therefore thinks he’s undesirable to all. Could it be that simple? I’m sure I’m not the only gay man — or person — who feels or has felt this way. Do you have to love yourself before you can love someone else or be loved by someone else? Is that a myth?

I keep wondering if I’ll ever love myself enough to be loved by another person. I hate being vulnerable, but vulnerability is key to opening one’s heart to another person. For years I’ve told myself, “When the right person shows up, I’ll know, and my heart will automatically open.” Is that utter bullshit?

Continue reading: How Do You Find Self-Worth When You Don’t Like Yourself? | Michael Rohrer.

A few years ago, I would not have touched the HuffingtonPost with a 10 foot mouse [now I have 100 fans there!] and I certainly would not have curated an article by a gay man. In the time between, however, many thinks [intentional] have changed. “We all want to be desired: by our family, by our friends, by a lover, by our coworkers.” This desire makes us all human and should unite, rather than divide…

Over 10 years ago, The Telegraph reported:

Whether you hail from Surbiton, Ulan Bator or Nairobi, your genetic make-up is strikingly similar to that of every other person on Earth, an analysis concludes today.

Although scientists have long recognised that, despite physical differences, all human populations are genetically similar, the new work concludes that populations from different parts of the world share even more genetic similarities than previously assumed.

All humans are 99.9 per cent identical and, of that tiny 0.1 per cent difference, 94 per cent of the variation is among individuals from the same populations and only six per cent between individuals from different populations.

Nonetheless, the team found that tiny differences in DNA can provide enough information to identify the geographic ancestry of individual men and women.

The results of the study, published today in the journal Science, have implications for understanding ancient human migrations and for resolving an ongoing debate about the use of family histories in medical research, said Prof Marcus Feldman of Stanford University who led the team.

via DNA survey finds all humans are 99.9pc the same – Telegraph.

Are we not, then, all interconnected persons? All sparks of the divine? All stardust?

Tara Brach writes:

Because so many of us grew up without a cohesive and nourishing sense of family, neighborhood, community or “tribe,” it is not surprising that we feel like outsiders, on our own and disconnected. We learn early in life that any affiliation—with family and friends, at school or in the workplace—requires proving that we are worthy. We are under pressure to compete with each other, to get ahead, to stand out as intelligent, attractive, capable, powerful, wealthy. Someone is always keeping score.

After a lifetime of working with the poor and the sick, Mother Teresa’s surprising insight was: “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of not belonging.” In our own society, this disease has reached epidemic proportions. We long to belong and feel as if we don’t deserve to.

D.H. Lawrence described our Western culture as being like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. “We are perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs,” he wrote, “we are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal.”

via Tara Brach: Everybody Has Buddha Nature.

Lo, these many years I turned to ‘tribes’ — Christian Fundamentalists, The Republican Party, The Green Bay Packers — to make me feel right inside when in truth everything inside me was screaming at me from the mirror that everything inside me was wrong, and to compensate for the lack of a cohesive, nourishing sense of belonging. By learning about and practicing self-compassion, however, I am making progress in making peace with myself, my past, my present and my future…

Thank you for your post, Michael, and for giving me pause to think about this topic. I agree that thinking our hearts will ‘automatically open’ is utter bullshit but, that if we practice self-compassion our hearts may slowly and gently open to the possibility of healthy interdependence and my hope is that when we are able to give ourselves at least the same amount of love, compassion and acceptance we seek from others, the craving to be desired may pass away. Namasté!