To be clear, I'm not the sort of person who believes that such advice is a terrible thing. On the contrary, being able to see yourself for who you are and accepting that reality isn't a bad thing at all, I'd like to think.
The issue comes when your self-image is predicated upon a foundation that was designed for one thing.
Maximizing self-loathing and self-hatred.
From an early age, I learned that being accepted by those around me would probably be the hardest thing I could accomplish. After all, going to school was a daily routine of degradation, abuse and rejection for a myriad of reasons.
If it wasn't the clothes I was wearing, it was the way I talked. If not that, then it was that I was smaller for my age. If not that, it was because I was smarter than most of the kids I was in class with and actually interested in learning. If not that, it was because I was descendant of a low-income family and not an upper middle-class one.
The one thing I never really understood is why it was that I became the constant target for such ridicule. I wasn't asking for it and I certainly wasn't encouraging it. I just wanted to be left alone, to have friends and to fit in, but it didn't happen because I was so different than "the norm."
As I went through all the calamitous crap I had to deal with in my late teens and early 20's, the level of self-abnegation I felt truly skyrocketed to where it's been ever since. No one ever walks out of a prison cell with a high opinion of themselves. They just don't. Why? Because that's not what it's designed for. Nor is the system which operates it.
The lie of this country is that we have a rehabilitative system for dealing with those who run afoul of the law for whatever reason. The truth is it's actually built around retribution. At no point did any of the shrinks I had to see ever work on building positive self-reinforcement. Not once. All it was, every week for five years was pointing out the worst parts of who I was perceived to be and hammering home how I could never have a "normal" life because there was something so wrong with me that I was no longer permitted to just be a regular person.
The severity of my self-loathing is not a sporadic occurrence. It has grown and been cultivated over a long period of time dating back nearly 30 years now and in that time, I have tried to figure out ways to circumvent that runaway train of thought and try seeing myself in a better light. Some days, I can, but it never lasts very long because there's always a trigger that sets my self-perspective back on what it deems to be the proper course.
Going through divorce and all that came after certainly didn't help either. If anything, it just reinforced the position I've always had.
Nobody loves you, Dev, and they're never going to no matter how badly you want them to. If they can't or don't, then there's really no point in you trying to either.
It's a vicious, self-sustaining cycle. You can only be accepted if you accept yourself, but it becomes harder to accept one's self if no one else wants them around either.
At this point, my self-awareness is so hypersensitive that I know both who and what I am probably better than I ever have before. I know what I've been through, the things I've achieved and overcome and every mistake I've made, be they trivial or otherwise. I live with memories, feelings and actions that I will always regret and wish I could change. I still have dreams for things I want to do before this life ends.
Love is an instinctual feeling we acquire from the moment we're born. Hate is something that is taught to us through outside influences. I know this because I only have to look at my son to realize that even at his age of three, he still sees the world in a totally different spectrum than I do, and I remember how at that age, I felt the same way. I didn't hate anyone and I certainly didn't hate myself by any measure.
But I still do now. I have for nearly the entirety of my life since. For me, it's much easier to exhibit love in an external capacity than an internal one and to me, it's no less real or valid. If someone ever hears me say the words "I love you,"to them, I honestly can't be any more sincere.
I can't because they're three words I've never, ever, been comfortable with saying to myself.
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