curiosity as (self) love
february 25
Two short pieces of writing this month— a belated Valentine’s ramble on (self) love and a letter about my life at the moment. Thanks as always for reading xx
In many ways, falling in love is like being a child again — the silliness, the impulsivity, the ease of laughter, the ease of tears. There is also the sense of constant and unbounded discovery. The chance to look at the world in a state of constant wonder and wondering. If I had to pick one synonym for love, it’d be curiosity.
I believe in love at first sight, or at least an instantaneous, unjustifiable curiosity. It’s the sense of ‘I’d like to know something about this person.’ Later, ‘I’d like to know everything about this person.’ You’re held rapt when they talk about what they had for lunch. I don’t know much about long-term love, but I imagine part of it is committing to curiosity, to being a close observer to ways the other person changes. This is the way I love my friends. It’s even the way I love London. I have a nearly limitless appetite and memory for facts about the city’s past and present lives.
Curiosity can also be a way to love yourself. By that I mean loving yourself by being interested in every bit of the way you experience the world — your senses, your feelings, your likes and dislikes, your best ideas and your worst ones, too. Maybe you take care to document these things. Maybe you use them as a starting point for art. Maybe you just pay attention. Not because your inner life is more interesting than anyone else’s, but simply because it’s the only one you’ve got. First fall in love with the world as seen through your eyes, then realise it’s the you’ll end up loving yourself, too.
I don’t know if you need to love yourself to love anyone else — many of us learn how to love only by being loved first. But curiosity can show us the dangers of loving another without loving yourself. You can end up seeing yourself as interesting only to the extent that the other person is interested in you. This is not great in general, even worse if the person in question doesn’t return your curiosity. (It’s unnecessarily cruel to claim to love someone but not try to know them at all.) When you lose interest in yourself, you might lose yourself completely.
If you were to ask me if I love myself, I would say yes on almost any day in my life. But then again, I remember how quiet my mind has been in the aftermath of relationships, and I wonder to what extent I let my curiosity about someone else subsume my curiosity about myself. Each time, it took me a while to put my own voice back in my head.
But more than being a prerequisite, self-love is an impetus for loving others. Once you’ve run your hands along every inch of your inner life, your existence feels like nothing short of a miracle — until you realise that the same phenomenon is playing out in every moment 8 billion times over. I think only by being well-acquainted with yourself can you begin to grasp what a wonderful thing this is. This is how we can distinguish self-love from narcissism, by which you inflate yourself by flattening everything and everyone else. To the contrary, self-love will never feel like enough. It makes you want to know other people in the same deep way you know yourself. And of all the ways to see into another person’s world, falling in love with them is probably the most effective and undoubtedly the most fun.
It’s also the best way to keep being curious about yourself. If you never live in close relation to other people, you’ll always stay the same. You’ll think you’ve cracked everything there is to know, and your curiosity will go extinct. Only by loving other people can you learn new ways of living and ask new questions of yourself. After all, another synonym for love is change.
Hello friends,
I’m writing to you from a train to Hamburg. We left London this morning and will arrive at our destination just after dinner time. The long journey is the first leg of a five-day field trip for my masters. It’s funny to be on a school trip as an adult; I keep expecting to have to ask for permission to use the loo. I’m a bit stressed in a very middle-school way about the social aspect — who am I going to eat lunch with? 1
In general, I haven’t quite got the hang of doing a part-time course on top of work. In the past, my approach to academic work has involved a lot of thinking interspersed with very little actual working. I’d be slightly embarrassed to admit how much of my time in Cambridge I spent sitting around or going on aimless walks. But even if I wasn’t sat in a library for 40 hours a week, my mind was always on my work. The walks to nowhere were part of my process. Unfortunately, this tactic is only effective when academics are a full-time pursuit. Now that I have a real job, I struggle to use a spare hour here or there to chip away at reading or writing. I can’t exactly bum off work to wander around for a few hours thinking of an idea for an essay. So I’m looking forward to this trip. I’ll have the chance to focus all my attention on what I’m studying, rather than just for a few slapdash hours on weekday evenings after I get home from the office. I usually think my best thoughts when I let things simmer. I’m hoping this week will give me the time and space to do that.
In general, I think I’ve been missing and craving extended periods of undiverted attention — immersion would be the word for it, I guess. The start of this calendar year has felt exceptionally busy. I’ve enjoyed how I’ve been spending my time, but the number of plans and commitments has made it hard to go about my days mindfully.2 I get stuck on the logistics of pulling it all off; the contents of my thoughts are mostly where I need to be, how long it’ll take to cycle there, and when I’m going to find time to fold the laundry that’s been on the drying rack for almost a week. When my inner monologue becomes more like my inner secretary, it’s hard to pay attention to what’s going on around me, let alone think critical or creative thoughts. The parts of me that are thoughtful or imaginative have been awfully quiet.
It doesn’t help that I've been tired lately. It turns out the combination of training for a marathon, cycling everywhere, and living in a country with an aversion to central heating really wears you out. I know that time is not an unlimited resource, but I’ve only just come to grips with the fact that neither is energy. Even before I got tonsillitis (twice) this month, I went to bed feeling like I could sleep for 12 hours straight if I got the chance.
So that’s why I didn’t write in January and kinda half-assed it this month. Keeping up with this blog is an important hobby for me, and I don’t want to let it slip. I also don’t want to miss out on the special kind of focus I feel when writing — the weeks pass too fast when you don’t ever sit down and give your all attention to just one thing. I’m not sure how I’ll go about finding more hours of focus. Probably planning to not always have plans. Maybe writing my schedule down so I’m not rehearsing logistics constantly in my head, and in general, accepting that this scheduling makes many of the best parts of life possible. I’ve been reading more than I have since I was in South America, so that’s something. Spending a whole afternoon with a book is perhaps the best way to slow your roll when life gets hectic. And even writing this brief note on a packed train has slowed down time in a lovely way and reminded me how I like to feel when I’m alone — grounded, soft, attentive to the interface of myself and the world around me.
In other news, yesterday I saw daffodils growing in a patch of grass by the pavement. The greyest months are almost over, and I swear I can see the relief on the faces of strangers. In England, the coming of spring feels like it can heal anything, but really, I think it just shows that any weariness you may feel is not your fault, and you are in no way doomed. On a day in late February, to stand in the sun is to feel forgiven and forgiveness all at once.
To the warmer and brighter days ahead,
Elizabeth
best of the year so far:
best thing I read — Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch; best thing I watched — Jenufa at the Royal Opera House (shoutout Doug); the best place I went — Miniatur Wonderland in Hamburg; the best thing I made — orange pistachio pesto and fresh pasta, all from scratch (shoutout Doug again); best thing I ate — post-long run snickers bars and cherry coke lmao
I’m finishing this up post-trip, and I’m happy to report I saw and learned a lot. and I did find people to eat lunch with
Also, if it isn’t obvious from the subject of this post, some of my thoughts and days have been filled by certain other things