You Don’t Need to Love Yourself First — And I’m Living Proof

They say you have to love yourself before someone else can love you.
They say it like it’s wisdom.
Like it’s the golden rule of human connection.
But in my life, that sentence was never spoken as kindness. It was a blade.

I remember being sixteen.
I was angry, confused, trapped in a body and a life that didn’t fit.
I hadn’t yet realized I was trans — I only knew that something in my world was off. And instead of love, I got fists. I got venom. I got told I was the problem.

One night, in the middle of yet another screaming match, my mother punched me in the mouth. And then she said it:

"You can’t expect anyone to love you until you love yourself."

Not like advice.
Not like guidance.
But like a curse.

What I heard was: You’re broken. You’re unworthy. And until you fix yourself to my standards, you deserve to be alone.
And because she was my mother, I believed it. I swallowed it whole.

That phrase didn’t make me a better person.
It made me a person who thought love was something you had to earn by being less difficult, less loud, less me.
It turned relationships into proving grounds. It taught me that every flaw was a barrier, and that I had to smooth my edges until I was unrecognizable before anyone could care.

And here’s the cruelest part — that phrase didn’t stay in my mother’s mouth. Years later, girlfriends repeated it to me like it was gospel. Each time, it reinforced the lie: you are not enough as you are.

But here’s the truth they never tell you:
People can love you even when you don’t love yourself.
They can see your worth when you can’t.
The problem isn’t that you don’t love yourself — it’s that you’ve been starved of love for so long, you start mistaking that starvation for a personality flaw.

I didn’t “fix” myself to earn love.
I fixed myself by cutting out the rot they planted in me. I cut away the cancer of their abuse, their manipulation, their conditional acceptance.
And in doing so, I found the real me.

The irony?
Today, I love myself.
Every single inch, every scar, every flame-forged piece of who I am. But my parents — they don’t love me anymore. Not the real me. They only ever loved the cardboard cutout they could control. They never knew their daughter. They never wanted to.

And yeah, I laugh about it sometimes, because it’s easier than crying. But here’s the thing: I’m not starved for love anymore. I built my own family. My partner. Our child. The friends and allies who show up without asking me to shrink.
That’s my real family.

So let’s call this phrase what it is when it’s used like that: emotional abuse wrapped in a Hallmark bow. It’s a tool of control, not empowerment. It’s a way for abusers to dodge accountability, to make your pain your fault, to turn their failure to love you into your moral shortcoming. It’s a lie designed to keep you quiet, compliant, and begging for the very love they’re withholding.

Anyone who says it to you in anger, anyone who uses it to dismiss your hurt, isn’t offering wisdom — they’re weaponizing a slogan to keep you in line. And if that makes you doubt your worth, remember this: love is not something you earn by reaching some mythical level of self-acceptance. Love is something you receive because you’re human and you deserve it. Full stop.

So the next time someone tries to hit you with “You have to love yourself first” as a way to shame or silence you, hear my voice in your head:
No. You don’t. You deserve love now. And you are allowed to walk away from anyone who tells you otherwise.