#7 Self-Loathing to Self-Love Is An Act Of Revolution.
Plus What Do You Want To Do Before You Die? And Prison Cats.
Hello everyone and welcome to Undividing where we are undividing ourselves and our world. In #7 this week we’re going to undivide self-love, bucket lists, and cats.
Well, not physically undivide cats. That would be messy and cruel, when actually this week’s Undividing Extra is a heartwarming and insightful affair.
In Undividing Our World, self-love is something that has been commoditised, turned into fridge magnet philosophies, and Goop-ed back to us as a fully fledged industry. I should know, I bought it all to find a way out of my self-loathing. What I discovered is that it took my most anti-capitalist, punk act of revolution to find self-love.
And bucket lists get a makeover in Undividing Ourselves that quite frankly had me ruminating for days.
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Undividing Our World: Unboxing Self-Love.
As I wrote last week, I was going to answer any questions about love and relationships that came in. Thank you everyone who wrote, I hope you appreciated my answers to your questions.
I had planned to reproduce them here, but then I had a realisation about love that is the master prompt. All the answers I sent basically were coming back to this.
Self-love.
The more I thought about it, the more self-love called to be covered here in Undividing Our World. Because it’s often promised and then derailed by our societies. But self-love is without doubt the basis of value for any other kind of love you may be offered in your life by family, friends, and lovers. Which you might be trying to find in work, income, and things that the world dangles in front of you, like I was.
That photo above there was recently sent to me by a friend Steve Pew. He took it the day we met at a street fair in 2013. There I was at 41, engaged to be married, owned a beautiful home in Los Feliz Hills of LA, head of a massive advertising agency, flying all over the world for work, making more money than I’d ever imagined.
And I absolutely hated myself.
Oh my God, I was fucking beautiful!
That’s what I thought when I opened Steve’s email on my phone. I stared at the screen, at this lost, desperate, stranger on the street.
My next thought was this: Thank goodness for him, or I would never have become me.
Why couldn’t I see what was so obvious to me now—that I was beyond blessed? Seeing how blind I was to this filled me with a wave of sadness.
Back then I disliked myself so intensely, I didn’t think I deserved any of it. That if it all went away the next day, that’s what I should have expected.
How did I get rid of it? I’d love to tell you it was a quick fix. It wasn’t. And I had to do it twice, and a bit…
Attempt #1 - The stranger in the furniture store
So there I was couch shopping in LA in 2008. I had just been granted my green card, and my big splurge was to buy a ridiculously good sofa to replace the one that I had dragged in off the street.
I’d been keeping my decorating scheme to begged, borrowed, and stolen in case the Immigration Service said, no thanks bro… oh and you have a week to leave the country.
But green-carded up, I was ready to invest in my first piece of my new life.
That’s when I spotted The Stranger. He was I thought, one of the handsomest men I’d ever seen in my life. In moments, I was by his side, using my foolproof pick up lines, and turning the Australian accent up to 11 on this unsuspecting American.
Something a friend once called, “your snake-charmer voice.”
Turned out he was a screenwriter like me. Smart, funny, cool. I was already writing the meet-cute recounting that we’d be using in our Oscar speech.
“So how’s LA going for you?” he asked.
I performed the customary roll-call of every project I had going, in every stage of development, using every bit of inside jargon I could muster. The Stranger nodded. He made all the right noises. Then when I was done, he asked me another question.
“So, how’s it really going?”
And with that, The Stranger ripped me in two.
I burst into tears. He put his hands on my shoulders. And I started blubbering about how I couldn’t meet anyone to date, how lonely I was, how I didn’t know what I was doing wrong, and why no one liked me enough to stick around.
By now we were sitting on the green-card sofa, his arm round my shoulder, as I cried into my Abercrombie & Fitch cargo shorts.
Then I asked him, how did he know? Was it that obvious how broken I was inside?
The Stranger then told me a story about how he was in exactly the same spot a few years ago. “How did you fix it then?” I demanded, wiping my wet cheeks. Then he said the words that set my life on a new course. The same ones I wrote in answer to George F last week.
“Go home and take all your dating profiles down. If someone asks you out on a date, tell them you aren’t dating right now. Don’t even take their number, just in case.”
“How long for?”
“Do it until the loneliness goes away.”
I thanked him, went home, took down everything, and even went through my phone and got rid of all the phone numbers of ghosters, stand-ups, and secret crushes.
Wait until the cement dries
The next year in LA was one of my happiest. I spent time doing things I loved, not things where I thought I’d meet guys. I became a better friend to my friends, not scanning a room over their shoulders for any potential mates.
And my hiatus got a lot of respect from guys who asked me out. Some even decided to try it too.
After a year, I loved my life. I was perfectly happy with me, no trace of loneliness left. So I put up a profile.
Five days later I was on my first date with my ex-husband. And here is where it went wrong. Not the date and not him, but me. This feeling of self-love was too new. I hadn’t let the cement dry.
Instead, I saw that I was reverting back to my old ways with my ex-husband. Which should have been the red flag. But I just saw it as the chequered flag: I won, I got a hot guy, I got my reward. Now I can forget everything I learned.
Attempt #2, #3, #4 - Post-divorce in Berlin
If you’ve read my book, you’ll know all about my 2018 rebound. But this time it was couched with some wisdom. I knew early on, John Hare and I would never make it. But that I also needed what he was going to teach me about life. Which oddly made it safe for the nine months we were hanging out. And it ended exactly as I knew it would from the beginning.
I tried to date an Irish Guy from London which went for a few months. Then he finished it. And again I was relieved—my need to test my results was running faster.
Those both hurt though.
Then the third guy was a weekend trip to Stuttgart, for one of the oddest dates I’d had in an age. And in a conversation with a friend at the airport on the way home I said, it’s the Irish guy all over again. I was over it by the time I landed at Tegel.
Suddenly, I’d broken through. The loneliness had gone away.
This time though, I wrote my name in the cement, and let it dry. Just my name.
Years went by. And I was perfectly happy on my own. There was some yearning, I won’t lie. But I also got very comfortable with the idea that I would live a life of love with my friends, and my family. And maybe a dog.
Then came Erik.
A Self-Love Life
What I didn’t realise until Erik is that self-love radically changes how you love someone else.
I didn’t need Erik to fix me. I had done that. For the first time in my life I wasn’t looking to a partner as a reward for my suffering or as a magic wand to make all my self-loathing go away.
Which meant I could love all of Erik. 100% of him. Especially the bits that would have been deal breakers. Everyone before him, I’d loved their parts that affirmed my desirability or their ability to fix me. The other parts, I’d pretend didn’t exist, or try to train them out of it. They were usually the sub-text of every fight.
It’s an insane amount of pressure to put on another human.
Self-love radically changed how I thought about love. How expansive it could be. How all-encompassing. Which changed how I thought about friendship. And even how I could find love for people who hated me and my kind.
Then came the next big lightbulb: the system had stopped working on me.
Self love is punk. It’s revolution. And it’s bad for the economy.
The not needing a person to make me whole, started extending to things. I no longer had this chasm that needed to be filled as Kae Tempest wrote in their song “Hold Your Own”:
Nothing you can buy will ever make you more whole
This whole thing thrives on us feeling always incomplete
And it is why we will search for happiness in whatever thing it is we crave in the moment
And it is why we can never really find it there
But if you're satisfied with where you're at, with who you are
You won't need to buy new make-up, or new outfits, or new pots and pans
To cook new exciting recipes
For new exciting people
To make yourself feel like the new exciting person, you think you're supposed to be
Happiness, the brand, is not happiness
We are smarter than they think we are
They take us all for idiots
But that's their problem
When we behave like idiots
It becomes our problem
Advertising didn’t work anymore. I used to feel a constant sense of lack, the kind of thing that advertising can get its claws into. But with that gone, I became immune to it.
I still feel it with my work, but that’s my ambition speaking. And one that I work on, like here in The Emotions Diary #2. The thing now is I can see what it is, what old pattern it’s talking to, and laugh about it. And for anything that’s confusing me still, I go into T.E.D.
When you don’t need to chase happiness in a new purchase, or likes, a person, a drug etc. you suddenly see that the whole system that we’ve created is a conveyor belt of empty promises.
Self-Love is the molotov cocktail you lovingly throw at the system.
Because people who feel content in themselves don’t need new things. They don’t start wars. They don’t take away other people’s rights. They don’t force their way as the only way.
So if you feel that everything in the world is wrong and you want to change it, start inside yourself. And work outwards from there.
Undividing Our World: What do you want to do before you die?
One of the biggest divisions we have in ourselves is the dreams we have, that we haven’t followed.
Bronnie Ware, in her book The Top 5 Regrets Of The Dying found that the number one regret is, “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Mark Manson wrote one of my bibles, The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck. He also has The Subtle Art podcast and in a recent episode had a guy called Ben Nemtin on it. Ben, pictured above, and a friend of his went on a road trip 20 years ago where they were trying to cross as many things off their bucket list as they could.
It turned into a business that they’ve been running for two decades where they encourage people to chase their dreams.
But the part of the podcast that really struck me was how he phrased it. It’s not a bucket list. It’s a question “What do you want to do before you die?”
That really changed the thought for me. It turned planning my life from a somehow, someday rumination, to an imperative. And one where the benchmark really makes you think about each entry’s importance; do I want to lie on my deathbed having done this or not?
I started my list of things to do before I die. And Ben encourages you to get as crazy as possible with it. Here’s a few:
ride a camel in the desert in Morocco
dogsled in Iceland under the northern lights
buy a home on an island in the Mediterreanean, and move there
climb Machu Piccu (fixing my knee has a goal now)
talk books with Tilda Swinton
make a great living from my writings
Get a book on the NYT bestseller list
The point that Ben also makes is this, tell people. They had insane success on their road trip because they told everyone they met their list and people hooked them up. I’m sharing all the above now, if you have any tips or help for these ones, let me know.
The last one, I started this week. It’s called “Undividing” and I hope will be a handbook for anyone like us that wants to undivide this world.
What’s on your list of things to do before you die? Let me know, and I’ll share it with everyone here next week and let’s see what connections we can make.
Undividing Extra: Love Cats: How Felines Busted Out 100 Felons
Pets are amazing. We all know this. But this story about a maximum security prison in Kentucky blew me away.
100 stray cats that were going to be put down were given homes with 100 prisoners in the facility. They wander the halls, do as they please, and dispense love wherever they go.
The prisoners have their own cats that they care for, feed, and sleep with.
The transformation has been incredible. Violence is right down. Prisoners pull extra shifts to buy things for their cats. Guards feel safer than they ever have.
But the cats didn’t do anything new. They didn’t teach the prisoners anything they didn’t know. Here’s the point. These feelings of love and willingness to be loved were already in all the prisoners, the cats just brought it out.
It’s a great reminder than all the best of everyone is always in them. We can always speak to that, it’s even the people we think of as enemies.
Self-love as an act of revolution, getting things done before you die, and the love of a good cat to show us what’s in everyone.
Till the Emotions Diary on Thursday, big undividing hugs to you all,
Karl
P.S. How To Burn A Rainbow just picked up two huge independent book awards—Reader’s Favourite and Best Indie Book Awards for LGBTQ+ Memoir!!!
You can pick one up from Jeff at the US Amazon store or from Ru Paul’s Allstora who now ship internationally. Or order one at your local bookstore.