3 of Hearts

Something to open when I’m feeling “not enough” • Originally written in 2020, edited in 2025

When I was a child, I had a very warped perception of love. I believed that in order to be lovable, to be “enough,” you had to be the best and most remarkable person at something. Intelligence; beauty; a finely honed art; proven efficiency at a hard skill.. you needed something quantifiable in order to be valued. 

I’ve come to realize this belief. I’ve dug into my flesh and found its reptilian roots coiling tightly around my veins. Time and time again, I’ve ripped them out, gritting my teeth as I sewed my skin back together.

The last time I opened myself up, I examined their point of access.

You see, I was brought up in a freakishly isolated manner, and we were a very poor family. My mom cared tremendously about our education, so we were transferred into wealthier schools. Back then, I was detached from the people around me, and I did not know how to relate to them, so I defaulted to observing them. I noticed immediately that the kids around me were resourced; they were prettier, well socialized, enrolled in extracurriculars, and so on.

The importance I placed on these observations was perhaps the single force that truly what irreparably widened the gap between myself and my peers. I don’t think this musters up enough noise from the talking heads, the way it can shake a child’s esteem to realize how uncontrollably different they are than their peers. I was unloved by the people around me, and I didn’t understand why, so I dug cognitive grooves connecting love and acceptance to my observations about who was loved; who was accepted; why I believed they were loved. In my innocence, I had dug deep and damning trenches throughout the same brain I would carry through adolescence and adulthood. I had commodified love.

Down the road, I got around to learning how to connect with others, first externally and later in so many meaningful ways. These beliefs, or cognitive distortions, as the therapists I’ve ghosted liked to call them, quieted into the background. The volume was lower in the sense that I no longer noticed the grip they held over my self worth. But I inhaled their whispers and exhaled toxic plumes in the direction of every relationship in my life for years to come. When I began to practice radical acceptance; when I began to heal; I realized how unhealed I was, and I observed how tremendously this schema had shaped me.

I’ve loved many people in every dimension of the term. I believe that we originally notice a person’s aura: the a combination of their energy, their mannerisms, and their self assurance. If their unique combination piques our interest, and we’re blessed enough that this feeing is shared, we start to peel back their layers, moving toward the quantifiable. Do we have shared interests and ambitions? Does this person fit our checklist of the qualities we need in a lover/friend/etc.? And believe that I’m not a critic of this process. 

But I’ll argue that we never fall in love- whether it’s a romantic love or soulmate friend love- with somebody due to these quantifiable factors. The magic is in the unquantifiable. You don’t love somebody because they’re athletic or beautiful. You may love these aspects of the person, and you’d may even cite them as reasons you love your person if asked…. but it isn’t your why. How do we even describe why? I think this phenomenon is why people give pause when a partner asks the infamous “so why do you love me?” question. How do we use words to explain a phenomenon that occurs beyond the realms speech, when to pin it to the confines of speech would by nature shrink the meaning? 

Our love for one another, when it runs deep, isn’t contingent on the quantifiable or even by the listable factor. We see this in the notion that we could remain in love with a person who is disfigured in an accident, or someone who develops dementia and loses precious aspects of their personality. Love even transients the life-death axis; many still pine after deceased lovers, and others believe full heartedly that we find the same souls again and again. 

I’ve fallen in love with the way a former friend would roll her car windows down, get on the highway, and belt out the same few songs because she couldn’t stand to hear anything else. I fell in love with the way another’s face would animate with fascinating micro- and macro-expressions with every fleeting thought, so when she would flip between thirty different expressions in a minute, I could understand the feelings she couldn’t articulate. The little idiosyncrasies that make each person them, the traits that make us each so unique but also so similar; but even these are not why we love a person. 

Authentic love, a thread cut from the fabric of the origin quilt, the motherly unconditional love, is love in motion, extended on a person’s best and worst days. And while I was healing, it occurred to me that your self love must operate the exact same way. We must love ourselves the exact same amount, every single day of our lives. This love is unconditional. It cannot be extended more on the days that we feel attractive, on the days that we feel lively and entertaining, on the days that we feel accomplished. It cannot be withheld on days we feel ashamed, on the days that we feel disappointed, on the days that we feel low. When I learned this, I looked around, and I could not unsee the lethal cognitive grooves that taught me that love was transactional and either deserved or undeserved. I’ve had to deconstruct each myself. 

Now, I’m just trying to fall in love with myself in the manners that I would a lover. I romanticize your own tendencies and the way that I hold my pen when I’m thinking and everything that feels uniquely me.