By Stephanie K. Hopkins
A dear friend of mine and I have a funny habit: We assault each other with supportive comments then respond by saying things like, “Thanks, um, I just threw up in my mouth a little,” and “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the deafening static.” If one of us persists and—oh dear Lord—continues the assault for an extended period of time, the receiver’s body tenses up, folds in on itself, and becomes filled with a mysterious acidic bile in search of an upchuck.
One night at the bar where I work, I received so much love I had to do two shots of tequila to suppress the bile. One friend bought me earrings for no reason at all, and another told me he loved me, not in the I-wanna-get-with-you kind of way, but in the I’m-grateful-for-you-in-the-world kind of way. I stood there as he looked me in the eye and said nice things about me, and I thought I would burn under the love I so desperately wanted. Short of puking on his shoes, I responded the only way I could under such an attack. I turned bro on him, punched him in the arm and said, “It’s all good, dude. Tequila shot?”
Why is it so hard to receive love? Dishing it out is easy. I can love the crap out of others. I think it might be my superpower in our cartoon parallel universe. There’s nothing more satisfying than making someone squirm under a precise articulation of why they are so damn lovable.
Is it that love is like the sun, and we can only look at it out of the corner of our eyes or through a pinhole projector? Deflection our only hope of surviving its bright burn?
One friend, who would respond to my proclamations of love with, “I really wish you wouldn’t,” once told me that being loved is too great a responsibility. For him, being loved means you are weighed down by someone else’s need for you. You can’t freely destroy yourself or you hurt those who love you; you can’t let yourself go to pot properly with love nagging your conscience like a persistent fly. There are times it’s easier to see ourselves as unloved and unlovable so we have the freedom to disappear.
Maybe it is difficult to receive love because we don’t see ourselves as deserving. And so, when we are loved, we come up against a deeply internalized sense that something is wrong and bad inside us, and if this person only could see it, they would snatch their love back and hightail it out of our vicinity. Like we are all ticking time bombs waiting to be discovered any second now for the frauds and unlovable losers we truly are.
And yet, we want love so badly. Perhaps this is what repulses us. This deep need that we see as a sign of weakness. Like when we post something on Facebook and want others to “like” it, and then we get a butt-load of likes and are grossed out by the whole exchange. As if wanting love is a disgusting, vile thing, right up there with YouTube videos of zit-popping, which are, by the way, wildly popular. Or when we find ourselves not calling or emailing anybody back and then wondering, Where did everybody go? Are they all hanging out together and not talking about me?
Yet if we are all unlovable losers, shouldn’t our sheer numbers cancel out each of our unique unlovableness? What if we resign from the club of The Unlovables and instead, let ourselves receive love?
Many years ago, an acquaintance said to me, “You seem like a person who grew up knowing people cared about you.” I wondered what he saw in me to make him say that. Was there a physical sign—a people-care-about-me mole or cowlick? It certainly couldn’t have been anything I was wearing, since I’ve always been a bit fashion-challenged (I’ve even been given rules by my significant others: only one shiny item and one animal print, and never the two at the same time).
What’s amazing is that what this acquaintance said is true. I did grow up knowing people cared about me, like how I knew but never thought about air; I just breathed it.
What would it look like if we all walked around feeling, in our core, that we are loved and we are lovable? We might burn up alive; the world might become an oozing pit of vomit.
Or we might actually be okay.
Stephanie writes short stories, non-fiction, and young adult fiction. She recently finished a young adult novel, "Edge of Seventeen," and is working on a memoir about her adventures as an ex-professor turned bartender. You can reach her at stephaniehop@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter @stephaniehop1.
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