Love for Yourself
Loving yourself, for me, turned out to be integrity. Not approval. I do not have to like everything about myself. I have to stop lying to myself about what I can do. Before my burnout at eighteen, I believed that becoming a better person meant cutting away every weak or messy part of myself until only something hard and flawless remained. But cutting away or repressing parts of myself was not honest. I did not need to carve myself into something perfect. What I really needed was rest, support, and the right environment to grow.
Every time I lied to myself, hid behind a label, or told myself that something was ”just not my thing”, I was treating myself as somebody who couldn’t handle the truth. Every time I acted like someone I was not, I liked myself a little less. Integrity means the opposite: telling myself what is true, and trusting that I can handle it.
Erik Thor, Why I Love
What I Learned About Integrity
Lying to myself
I had the world’s worst poker face with other people. With myself, however, I was a world-class con artist. I could omit inconvenient facts from my own awareness. I could use negative self-talk, emotional framing, and manufactured fear to convince myself to quit a job, end a relationship, or stay stuck in a situation that was hurting me. Truth is about seeing past the story you tell yourself about who you are.
The friend who said Stop
I think about every negative thing I once said about myself. I often did it out loud, in front of friends and family. I would tell them that I sucked, that I was a failure, a loser, and they wouldn’t know what to do with it. One friend told me: ”Stop.” In that moment I saw what I was doing. I had thought the disrespect was a way of pushing myself to improve. It wasn’t. It was just disrespect.
Meeting Future Versions of Myself
Finding your real voice starts with a radical assumption: assume that almost everything you currently know or think about yourself is incomplete, and often entirely wrong.
”This is just who I am,” I said stubbornly at fifteen when my mom tried, in vain, to convince me to study advanced mathematics. ”I’m just not good at maths,” I retorted. ”It’s just not my thing,” I insisted.
What does it even mean to declare that something is ”not my thing”? Years later, I discovered that I have a genuine affinity for mathematics, and that I can find immense joy in solving complex logical puzzles. Whenever I failed at something, I decided it had never been my thing and stopped. Maybe you have told yourself that same lie.
Later in life, I did the exact same thing with technology: ”I’m just not a programmer. I’m more people-oriented,” I tried to convince myself. Today, I work as an IT architect, collaborating closely with people and writing code to build features that support them in their daily work. When I lived in the Netherlands, I told myself: ”Dutch is not for me.” Now, I light up every single time I get the chance to speak Dutch.
If there is anything my life has proved to me, it is this: I am so much more than I think I am.
”I haven’t met the version of myself that likes olives yet. I hope to meet him one day. I’m willing to try them again.”
Micro-test quiz with 10 questions
Love For Yourself Match
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Reflection & Practice
Questioning Your Self-Concept
What label do you hide behind when things get intimidating: ’not creative,’ ’not athletic,’ or ’not good with people’? What beginner skill are you avoiding simply because you hate feeling clumsy, and what would it take to let yourself look silly for a week?
Continue Your Journey
Take the Eight Practices of Love Test
Discover where your love for yourself stands alongside the other seven practices of care. 48 reflective questions, instant breakdown.
Explore the Book Why I Love
Read Chapter 5 of Why I Love on how I stopped criticizing myself, dropped the armor of labels, and learned integrity.
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