I have similar struggles with negative thoughts and measuring myself against what I imagine other people’s lives are.

One of the questions I had to wrestle with as i attempted to work through this problem was the question of love itself and what it would look like to ‘love’ myself. Like Joni Mitchell I discovered I didn’t know love at all – “I’ve looked at love from both sides now from give and take, and still somehow it’s love’s illusions I recall I really don’t know love at all”

So essentially I was trying to learn to love myself when I didn’t have a clear picture or idea… of this thing called love.
(Today for me the word love contains qualities of meaning, purpose, accountability, discipline, spontaneity, authenticity… which might at first glance qualities that might appear to contradict but they don’t.)

When you say you don’t love yourself what would loving yourself look like?

I also noted your comment about losing your ego which was also part of the struggle.
In in the west we tend to over identify with our ego – I am my ego, I am what I do, I am the roles I play… While the east negation of the ego has when practice unskillfully I think leads to the loss of sense of self and lethargy. The submission to caste and fate is a natural outcome to the loss of connection to our I and me.

By negation of my ego I could find peace of mind and being (is this love?) but only as long as I removed myself from interaction with life as it was. I noted even Gautama had to leave his family. As I need food and shelter I didn’t see how this was going to work.

It seems to me that what I call the ego was an import part of the whole of who I was and that my attempt to negate it was like cutting off an arm or a leg. Through mediation I understood my ‘I’, my sense of self was not my ego, I was not what I did for a living, I was not my thoughts… I noticed however that it was my sense of I through which I set intention and was the part of me that was conscious. What is aware? I am. Limited though the I is, it is the part of the whole that experiences..

I am not my consciousness yet it is though the I that the I become conscious.

I began to think of my ego not as a CEO or captain but a kind of librarian that filtered information and experience, a communication channel that connected the unconscious, memory, filters… to the conscious and from that intention.

Anyway maybe that doesn’t make any sense or matter…. It just that I know that I’m not alone that my unskillful desire to lose my ego left me feeling listless and disconnected from my experiences (defiantly not love)

The shift from no longer trying to negate my ego but accept my sense of I as playing necessary role in my experience of becoming has help me let go of the negative thinking associated with the labels (usually based on comparison to others) I have applied to myself.

I am not my ego, however my ego is a part of the whole that is me, my authentic self, and as such has value.
The ego wasn’t something I had to lose but acknowledge… and well love

Dear Isabella:

I think Not. If that relationship you had in high school was very emotional for you; if he told you things about yourself and you believed him, then those beliefs are in your memory- “facts” and emotions, all tangled. What are those “facts”- the things he told you about you?

anita