You Can't Be In Love

                I sat in the back of Dawn Deweese’s (I’m sure she’d feel more revered if I called her Ms. Deweese, as I did with all my high school teachers, that is, until I graduated and then took the liberty of calling them all by their first names, whether they approved or not) class as she drew a pyramid on the board—I had already had numerous health classes throughout grade school; I was not about to relearn the food groups.  The class was titled “Effective Skills,” and it was a required course for all freshmen.  With a name like that, you would think lessons would consist of Tiring Changing 101 and How To Land A Job Even If You’re Not Qualified.  But at an all-girl, Catholic school, effective skills meant something deeper than abilities plugged into a formula only to be applied into physical trade skills.  Effective skills meant facing the part of life that is often the hardest to understand and maintain: you.

                The pyramid consisted of 5 layers, from the bottom up; physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—these were the needs for the ultimate human condition.  I tugged at the sleeves of my gray, wool sweater and fidgeted with the hem of my maroon and white plaid skirt.  This is stupid, I thought, I have everything I need.  Why do I have to take a class that tells what I need? Who the hell does Abraham Maslow think he is, just butting into my life and telling me how to be human?   We were asked to draw a pyramid, and assess where we believed to be.  Of course, as an overconfident, headstrong 14 year old girl who was scared away by any sort of introspection, without even thinking, I circled the pinnacle of the pyramid with my Electric Lime marker (at an all-girl high school, the majority of work is done in bold, neon colors.  Or bubble letters).  Now, as an overconfident, headstrong 22 year old who fondly uses a little bit of navel-gazing to confront the question, what the fuck were you thinking?, in retrospect, this may have been the class that I needed the most—you know, that saying, “blessing in disguise.”  But I wouldn’t realize it until much later.

Physiological: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion.

                In Catholic school teaching, I’m almost positive the ‘sex’ part was left out of this bottom rung (I would learn all about abstinence and the Catholic doctrine surrounding sex during my sophomore year in Catholic Moral Teaching—another required course).

                I always knew I was lucky when it came to physiological needs.  I feel like anyone who has parents who can scrape up the funds to not only send one, but three girls to private school from K-12 has all of their needs pretty much met.  My parents worked their asses off to make sure their children could be educated in Catholic schools, because that’s how they wanted us to be raised, regardless of if it was monetarily feasible.  Some nights, my mother wouldn’t get home until 9pm, because she’d be busy building her new business where she’d eventually become COO, and my dad was left to fend for himself. One of my earliest memories is crying in the bathtub when I was about 4, because my mom wasn’t home in time to give me my bath, which she always did before I went to bed.  My dad tried his best, as he spoke in a falsetto to make me laugh and imitate my mom as he took over her nightly duties.  He was a shoddy replacement, but hey, what can a guy do?  I always had food on the table; mainly due to my mom’s badass cooking skills, which I have yet to obtain (and probably won’t), and I always had homeostasis by way of the correct balance of mother and father figure constantly shaping who I became.  Come October, my parents will celebrate their 35^th wedding anniversary, and I realize how lucky I am to say that my parents are still together, despite the times my dad tells my mom she needs to chill out and despite the times my mom calls my dad a dickhead for being insensitive (I’m almost positive she got that word from me, but I don’t want to take too much credit).

Safety: body, employment, resources, morality, family, health, property

                I ran around the cul-de-sac barefoot until my dad flipped on the porch light.  Apart from a few scrapes, a rusty nail to the foot followed by a trip to the immediate care center for a tetanus shot, and some calluses that will forever haunt me and anyone who will ever give me a pedicure, I never doubted that I was safe.  I’m sure my parents would’ve loved to have kept me outside all night, and I’m sure I could have entertained myself (I suffered from youngest child syndrome; my sisters wouldn’t hang out with me, so I frequently resorted to talking to myself or inanimate objects—something that I openly admit has been carried into my adult life as well), but I had a place to call home at the end of the night, despite my protests of, “oh, come on, just ONE MORE kickball game!”  I knew that I was safe. And my family was safe. And that all of my prized possessions, like the Bonne Bell chapstick collection I kept in the top drawer of my nightstand and the trunk of Polly Pockets in the basement, were safe.  I got a few wallops to the ass over the years that were most likely deserved, a broken wrist which was inflicted by my own stupidity and amateur ability to ride an ATV, and went through a tonsillectomy like a champ after missing 16 days of kindergarten due to strep throat, but nothing ever threatened my physical security (unless you count the fist fight that I almost got into at a Red Hot Chili Pepper’s concert, but that’s another story for another time).

Love: friendship, love, family, affection, belonging

                The first time I said, “I love you,” to someone other than my mom or dad or immediate family members and friends, I was 15 years old.

                I’ll pause for a minute and let you laugh.  Don’t worry, I’d do the same thing if I just read something like that.

                If I take a minute to look back on who I was when I was 15 years old, it brings me to one of those, what the fuck were you thinking? moments.  This is where my pyramid would start to fall apart eventually, despite my lime green indicator that I had made it to the top.  Fifteen.  There is nothing stable about a 15 year-old.  You get pissed off if your parents buy the wrong cereal, and then when they go back to return the Cocoa Pebbles and get Cocoa Puffs like you had asked, you decide that cereal isn’t your thing anymore and you want only hormone-free eggs for breakfast, because you’re trying this new eat-everything-natural-because-that-girl-with-the-henna-tattoo-in-your-English-class-seems-cool-and-she-does-it diet.  Fifteen is an age for transparency and vapidity and changing who you are every time the wind picks up.  How can you love someone if you don’t even know who you are?

                When I first dropped the L bomb, I was convinced that I meant it.  And every single time that followed.  To fix a fight.  I love you.  To end the night.  I love you.  Just to fill the air with words. I love you.  But the sad part was, I couldn’t even look at myself and say I love you, because I was so wrapped up in trying to be and not just being.  I felt the need to change myself to make someone fall in love with me, constantly morphing in order to get a response.  I wanted love, and goddamnit, I would have it, even if I had to blindfold it, wrap it in burlap and stuff it in my trunk.  With juvenile love rooted in whether or not he called when he said he would, checking to see who he’s talking to on AIM (I’m telling y’all, it was back in those days; I was THAT young and idiotic), and starting fights as tests just to see if he really cared and wanted to fight for the relationship, I kept digging a hole and attempting to fill it back up with I love yous.

                My friends fucking hated me.  And accused me of “not being myself,” whatever the hell that meant, because who were they to tell me who “myself,” was, right?  In all honesty, I had no idea who to tell myself to be, either.  Depending on the day of the week, I’d pick something new.  Some days I liked who I was, and some days I didn’t, and most of the time, it was based on whether or not he liked who I was that day.  Like marking a fucking calendar every day; he loves me, he loves me not.  It was my own fault, though.  I can’t put blame on other people that I was too stubborn to be patient and let myself naturally develop into who I am. I wanted to waste my I love yous on someone else instead of me.

Esteem: confidence, self-esteem, achievements, respect of/by others

                It took a while to figure out who I was.  And it didn’t happen all at once.  I didn’t just wake up and think, huh, alright, cool, I’m finally me.  Even though I’d like to wake up to that every morning (and maybe some pancakes along with it), it’s a process, which I didn’t realize until recently.  As inconvenient as it sounds, I think it may have been helpful to hate myself before learning to love myself.  Hate may be a strong word.  Let’s just say, if I met me and spent an afternoon with myself, I would’ve thought, this girl is off her meds.  What I slowly started to put together was that you can’t be in love unless you’re in love with yourself first.  And in love with your life and all that entails.  How can someone possibly give herself to someone else if she hasn’t even been received by herself (there’s some sort of really awful sex pun in there, but just go with it, you know what I mean)? It’s hard to grasp that I only get to be me once.  And do I want to die as the crotchety ol’ bitch who never liked herself or anyone else except her animals and the hanging plants inside her patio home in Arizona?  Fuck. That.  Every day I like myself a little bit more (except when I have hangovers or am on my period. Hey, I’m only human), and if I keep confidence and respect in myself, others will put it in me as well (okay, another really bad sex pun, sorry, I’m not trying to make this saucy, it’s just happening).

Self-actualization: morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

                I don’t mean to dwell on the past, and I don’t mean to call anyone out.  Which I’m sure I’ve done and will never hear the end of it.  I only do this to document a passage that most people have to go through before they figure all this life shit out.  I’m currently approaching the final level of Maslow’s Hierarchy, and you know, maybe he does know a little something about what I need.  It’s not easy for me to admit this, but I was wrong.  That may be the only time you see me type that.  Ever.  But I’ve accepted everything I am at this point.  All the good and bad and weird and ridiculous and quirky and disgusting and endearing.  And I don’t have the time to waste not loving every bit of it.       

                If I could go back in time, I would yank that Electric Lime marker out of my hand and place it back into my glittery purple Spacemaker.  I would grab myself by the shoulders and have no qualms with shaking the shit out of 14 year-old me.  I would also tell myself to not date anyone until I’m at least 20, because everyone until then are poor excuses for anything resembling “boyfriend material,” so don’t waste an ounce of love that I could spend on myself.  I would assure myself that I grow up to be fine—even a little badass—and not to fuck it up.  But most importantly, I would pull out that Electric Lime marker again and in huge bubble letters across the front of my planner (which was covered with pictures of Gerard Way; it was a really weird phase for me, I prefer not to answer any questions about it), I would write,

YOU CAN’T BE IN LOVE UNLESS YOU LOVE YOURSELF FIRST.