I Don't Love Others More Than Myself

I don't think I've ever loved anyone more than I love myself.  Or even as much.

Not that I'm particularly thrilled with myself.  But I think you can't help but love yourself to some degree, in that you feed and clothe yourself and you treat yourself and tell yourself things that help you feel better about yourself.

But I think there is an experience which is both terribly human and also transcendent.  Which is learning to love someone else more than yourself.  I think it most often happens when you have kids, but also when you find a husband or wife (I'm sure it doesn't always happen, but it ought to).  For some, it's God.  For some it might be cats or something else, but that's a discussion for another time.

Something happens, over a short time or a long time, where a person's focus shifts off of themselves and someone else becomes more important.  My friend John will go home at the end of a long, tiring day.  And he will do the dishes.  Why?  Because while he doesn't like doing dishes, he knows that's how his wife will feel loved.  That's just a small example, but it happens over and over, day after day.  We all know there are much larger examples of parents who will go without food so their kids can eat and stuff like that.

And I think that's part of what sands the rough edges off of people.  They lose a lot of their pride and humble themselves by choosing to put someone else first.

I don't do that.  I mean, I do it here and there.  But there's nobody that I love enough to set aside my own wants and needs on a regular basis.  Which is a shame.  I think that's a big part of why I still have so many rough edges - I may be getting even rougher as I get older and spend days at a time with only myself.  Plus, I honestly think that's an amazing transformation that is worth the pain and annoyance that it takes to get there.

But you generally can't make yourself care about someone or something any more than you do.  You either care or you don't.  And I don't.  Which is not to say that I don't care at all.  I mean, I care some.  Sometimes a lot.  But never to that level where your focus starts to shift, where you make room for another ego next to yours.

And, obviously, this has repercussions for my relationship with God.  I think the best way to learn to love God is to practice with other people.

Plus, I've always believed that life is about people and relationships.  And this truth is at the heart of relationships.  So without it, my life seems a little pointless.

My Meiers-Brigg temperament is INTJ.  My type is called the Engineer and we tend to like picking things apart and seeing how they work and trying different combinations of things.  For some reason, this inclination of mine has always been on people, rather than on something like science or engineering - something where I could use this talent to make a living ...  Anyway, I've spent a good chunk of my life, when I'm not daydreaming about time travel, analyzing people.  Trying to figure out what makes them tick.  Figuring out motivations and emotions and tendencies and temperaments.  And I think that's why, even though I'm an introvert, I've always had a decent number of friends.  I want to spend time with people and make sense of them.

But this does often leave me on the outside, processing, looking in.

I wish I had an epiphany to end this one with.  I wish I knew how to engage more, care more.  I wish I could  sand off these rough edges.  But it eludes me.