Do I love myself?

Love and clear-sight seem almost the same to me.  Quoth Ender, “I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”  I once defined “love” as “appreciation of beauty”, where “beauty” is anything that you find intuitively good or positive, and “appreciation” I intentionally left undefined.  There is a thing that appreciation and beauty both seem to share: both involve me being a “yes” to something, on a deep level.  I think it’s impossible to really understand, to really see clearly, without being a “yes” to the person or thing being understood.

Val speaks of a sort of clear sight that leads inexorably to action.  There is a level at which, I imagine, standing next to a drowning child and realizing that they are drowning, the act of saving the child is automatic.  Groundedness, for me, is a sort of unshakableness in being with what is.  During the AMP “back-off” exercise, my pathway to groundedness was through my commitment to seeing clearly and being with what is.  My pathway to love was the same.  I started from a place of groundedness in being with the fact that my sister *is my sister*, and from that place, found my love for her.  Why did I love her?, the burly guy standing in for the demons of humanity asked me.  “Because I *do*,” I said; because that is the way reality is.  From this place, I touched love for the man confronting me, for the men he stood in for: it is *sad* that life has brought some people to a place where the thing it makes sense for them to do is threaten violence, to threaten rape, to do violence.  These people are not flourishing, and it is sad, that they do not get to experience themselves as so much more.
From this place, of groundedness and love of my sister and love of this demon, I channeled anger, willfulness.  I saw that it made sense for this demon to threaten my sister, and that did not touch my love for her.  Loving my sister meant that I would stand in the way of harm to her.  Loving the demon aligned with this, for it is not an act of kindness or love to allow people to do such violence.  By the end of the back-off exercise, my throat was raw from commanding “back off!”, and my arms were tingling with what seemed to be anger.

I think I see a bit more clearly why [Backward With Purpose][1] touches me so deeply.  Love, in that story, seems to come from a place of seeing clearly and acting on that clear-sight.  And it is so, so easy for me to see clearly how deeply love touches those characters, and moves them, and how deeply painful it is when that love is absent, for lack of clear sight.

Non-self-deception is the deepest value I’ve found myself to hold.  Deliberately deceiving myself seems incomprehensible on a deep and fundamental level, and I’ve yet to find any value that trumps that one.  The person who I am is not a person who acts from a place of deliberate self-deception.  This is part of how I move through the world.

In a close and very-related second place is truth, or seeing clearly.  I don’t always act from this place, but I strive for it.  It’s not yet part of how I move through the world, but I’d like to get to the point where it is.  From here, I think, springs my love.  It seems incomprehensible to me to want to not move towards a place of seeing more clearly.  In some sense, it seems incomprehensible to me to want to not move towards a place of loving more.

So, to tie it all up, there is some sense in which I love myself, some ways in which I see myself clearly.  There are other places where I don’t yet see myself clearly, parts of myself that I don’t yet love, and I’m working on that.

[1]: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4101650/1/Backward-With-Purpose-Part-I-Always-and-Always