More than anything, whether it's my dad's fault or whatever, I wouldn't allow myself to be loved. I lived most of my life thinking that I was unlovable, that I was broken goods, or whatever.
The child who acts unlovable is the child who most needs to be loved.
Maybe you've decided you're not a genius, that you're not brilliant, that you're not prosperous, that you're not wonderful, that you're not lovable. Well, you know what? You're both: you're unlovable and you are lovable. And they both need equal time.
Unworthiness is the inmost frightening thought that you do not belong, no matter how much you want to belong, that you are an outsider and will always be an outsider. It is the idea that you are flawed and cannot be fixed. It is wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable, or wanting to love and feeling that you are not capable of loving.
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
I'm not sure I'm very confident at all. There was a lot of my life when I thought I was fundamentally unlovable.
I suppose I'd always been attracted to commitment-phobes because some part of me felt unlovable. It was a lot easier to fall for a guy who I knew, on some level, wouldn't fall in love with me. There was nothing to risk. The real risk would be to finally be vulnerable to love.
That's one of the biggest fears a lot of trans people have if they decide to come out, that they're making themselves unlovable and that they'll never have a relationship again.
The belief when your mother gives you away is that there's something deeply wrong. Mothers don't give babies away. There's something wrong with me, something unlovable, something seriously flawed in me. It's a fundamental thing; it's precognitive. You feel it rather than think it. How could you not?
Anyone who has ever been an ugly adolescent - and we are legion - knows that the feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never goes away; it is always there, lurking just beneath the surface.
