Hi Matt,

You said:

Do you love yourself, Kaz? You analyze yourself, follow your desires, but do you feel warmth and happiness when you look in the mirror? Do you think love is something that has to be earned?

I don’t know whether those are typically hard questions to answer, but finding one that works for me is proving difficult at the moment. My initial instinct was to say “of course!, why wouldn’t i?”, but it doesn’t really fit. I can’t say I love myself. I can say I’m comfortable with who I am and generally accepting of myself, while wishing I was better.

I look in the mirror frequently. My health took a bit of a hit when Chris passed and I’d always thought that the stress of what happened took it’s toll. However, a couple of years ago, a physical issue that had been suppressing my circulatory system resolved itself by chance, and I realised that actually the thing that took it’s toll on my health was a skiing accident I had in January of 2006! It was just close enough in time to Chris’ death that I mistook the cause and effect and erroneously believed that the issue was something that couldn’t really be fixed directly (because I was assuming the cause was stress based, not physically based). This effect of the issue wasn’t something really obvious, but a gentle guiding force preventing my body from healing itself properly and setting my health on a general downward trajectory.

I mention this, because it has an effect on what I see when I look in the mirror.

What I see when I look in the mirror is someone who looks far worse than he did in 2005, but a lot better than how he looked even in 2014. Unfortunately, the best part of a decade of declining health hasn’t been kind, and though my health improves noticeably every day, it’s clearly going to take a year or two more before I look like the fully healthy version of myself again.

I know you weren’t really talking from an aesthetic viewpoint, but when I look in the mirror I see the imperfections that stop me from looking like the best version of myself. I’m not talking about wanting to change my features, nose jobs and the like, I’m talking about the quality of my skin, hair, eyes, teeth. The good news is that some of those things improve every day. I actually have grey hairs that are turning dark brown again, such was the extreme poor state of my health! (well, I did. I recently dyed my hair blonde to connect to my mother a little bit, so my natural hair colour is a little bit irrelevant at this point!)

So ultimately, when I look in the mirror, I see the imperfections. What needs fixing. But these aren’t the insecurities of an immature mind worrying about what their peers will think. These are the objective assessments of an analytical person, who knows that it’s possible for someone to love me with these imperfections, but that I can’t really love myself fully until they’re fixed, because the person I see isn’t the real me.

I’m a bit vain though!

Love, I believe can be given freely. People with generous souls do that all the time, with their acts of charity and care for complete strangers that haven’t done anything that would make you say they deserve that love. But that’s ok, as it’s their love to give freely, and they are free to give it as often as they want and to whomever they want. I also think those people are the exceptions. The people I encounter daily in my life don’t give love freely, but then these aren’t people that I know. When it comes to love given with people I have pre-existing relationships with, I would say that it’s given freely, but there is a prerequisite level of trust required that allows that love to be given freely. Ultimately, I think love is given freely, but most people protect themselves a little bit as they want to know that there will be some kind of return on their investment.

Kaz