Seneca, Figs, and the Thing I Can't Call Self-Love

‍I have been reading (well more properly listening to) philosophy this week.

‍For those of you who have been here for a while, you will know that I love a book that makes me question everything I know about life. Small talk sucks in real life, it sucks even more in your own head. I noticed a few months ago that when I stop and really listen to the conversations that go on in my head they sounded a lot like ‘if I get home at 3pm, I can have something to eat and then I will have enough time to do a social media post before I need to leave at 5pm, no, I don’t need to be there until 6pm tonight so, 5:50’ swiftly followed by ‘bin bags’. It had started to bore me to tears.

‍So I bought a philosophy bundle on Kindle and started working my way through. My intention was to give myself a new perspective and set off on my daily dog walk with a question instead of letting myself ramble inanely about nothing.

‍Here is what I have learned so far. Philosophers are, for the most part, just humans writing down what they think. Their internal dialogue, even written down sounds a lot like mine. That is not me sounding grandeous, it reassured me that those boring thoughts I have, well, they are normal. In Roman times, the setting for most of the philosophers I have waded through so far, there is a disproportionate amount of musings about figs. And wine. And figs and wine together. Sometimes there is cheese and bread too. I am starting to suspect that ancient philosophy was less about the pursuit of wisdom and more about finding wisdom in very ordinary moments.

‍Every now and again though, just like in my head, there is a nugget of gold. This week Seneca stopped me.

‍Nothing grows again so easily as love.

‍Five words. I was in the gym. Mid set. I stopped, paused Audible and sat down. I just stared at my weights for a while, like a crazy person (or someone I would have assumed was procrastinating. Next time I will offer them the grace that they have just been hit by a though bomb that knocked them off their stride too).

The problem with self-love

‍I need to tell you that I dislike the term self-love intensely.

‍Not because the idea is wrong. The idea is right — profoundly, urgently right, especially for the women I work with, who have spent so long loving everyone else that the concept of directing any of it inward feels somewhere between indulgent and incomprehensible.

‍I dislike it because of what the wellness industry has done to it. Self-love has become a product. A bubble bath. A face mask. A journal with a gold foil cover that costs £24 and just asks you to write down all of the reasons you need to improve yourself, implying that by buying the journal, you are somehow doing life wrong. That there is something in you that needs to be a little bit better so that you understand what love actually is and why you don’t have any for yourself.

‍Somehow, love, especially for ourselves has just become another thing to be bad at.

‍And that is precisely the opposite of what it is supposed to be.

‍So I try to avoid the term. I try to find other ways in. I like to ask women how they like their eggs instead, because knowing what you actually want for yourself — really knowing, not performing knowing — is closer to the thing than any amount of bubble baths.

‍ Which is why Seneca's five words stopped me.

‍ ‍Nothing grows again so easily as love.

‍What I think he meant

‍I can't tell you what Seneca meant. Nobody can, really. He has been dead for nearly two thousand years and even if he were here, he would probably just offer me a fig and tell me it was not his place to give meaning to it. That I should do that myself.

‍But here is what I took from it.

‍Love, not the romantic kind, well… even the romantic kind, the real kind, the practiced kind, the love built from knowing yourself well enough to know what you actually need — is not fragile. It has roots. It is not a thing you install perfectly, then walk past and dust occasionally. It is something that starts out small, like when you plant a seed and it starts to pop it’s little head out of the soil.  It is not a performance you keep up or a standard you meet. It is something that has roots, and intention, it knows what it is and doesn’t try and be anything different. All you have to do is water it, speak kindly to and maybe move it out of the glaring sun if it looks like it’s dropping. The thing is, sometimes we have to go on holiday (oh no, poor you) and the plants don’t get watered, they frazzle a little because the weather here was ten times hotter than your travel destination (murphy’s law 101). Or maybe work took over and you forgot about it. And it wilts. All is far from lost.

‍I think Seneca meant that love is the same. With firm roots it is something that grows back.

‍Even when you drift from it. Even when life asks too much for too long and you forget to ask yourself how you are doing because everyone else needs asking first, and who asks themselves that anyway (you, please). Even when the version of you who knew what she wanted feels like someone you used to be.

‍The pattern is still there. Waiting to be found again.

‍And it comes back more quickly than you think.

‍The grass, the heat, and Nora

‍I trained outside on Friday. A rare UK mega summer day that felt like wading through soup. I had decided that wasting sunshine was not on my agenda, so I took my programme out onto the grass and set up outside the gym on the only sliver of non-concrete there is.

‍My programme was handstands. I have done handstands so many times that my body usually just knows what to do. First or second rep, I find the balance, I am there.

‍Not on Friday.

‍The grass changed the stability under my hands. The slight slope of the garden meant my body had to find balance differently, recalculate everything. And Nora — the voice in my head that tells me I can't, that I am too tired, that I should go back inside and stick to what is known and proven — turned up almost immediately.

‍She does not usually bother me during handstands. She knows I have got it.

‍Except I was on grass. In a heatwave. With my shades on. And suddenly I did not have it. Not in the way I usually do.

‍Here is what I know from teaching my dogs tricks, and learning my own alongside them. The moment you change even one variable — a new environment, a new texture, a new sensation — you have to learn the skill again. Not from scratch. But close enough that it feels like it.

‍Harley and Flynn will sit outside Betty's Tea Rooms without a second thought. Ask them to sit in the middle of a busy Saturday market and you will be waiting a long time. Too much going on. Too many distractions. The skill is there — they know how to sit, they have always known how to sit — but the conditions are different and so the retrieval is harder.

‍Friday's handstand was exactly that.

‍And this is not just about handstands.

‍I can practice speaking kindly to myself at home, in the quiet, when nothing is pressing and Nora is having a day off. Then I hit a red light when I am late and the driver in front wants to do fifteen miles an hour and that kindness practice — it is there. But it is so much harder to find. It takes the same concentration as the first time I tried it.

‍The love — for yourself, for your own nervous system, for the version of you underneath all the roles — it does not disappear when you drift from it.

‍ It just needs different conditions to find its footing again.

‍What growing back easily actually looks like

‍It does not look like waking up one day and deciding to love yourself. It does not look like a morning routine or a gratitude list or a perfectly balanced week.

‍It looks like noticing you have drifted. That is the whole skill.

‍Not the arrival. The noticing.

‍Because once you notice — once you catch yourself mid-Nora spiral and recognise that the voice telling you that you are failing is not the honest one — the pattern starts to reassemble. Not instantly. Not perfectly. But with less effort than you used the first time, because the path has already been walked.

‍This is what I think Seneca meant. Love, in all its forms including the most difficult kind — the kind you direct at yourself — does not need to be rebuilt from scratch each time. You are not starting over. You are returning.

‍And if you have done it once, even imperfectly, even briefly, even just in the quiet of a Tuesday evening when you made yourself a cup of tea and sat by the window for five minutes without apologising for it — you know the way.

‍Getting back is always faster than getting there the first time.

‍The eggs, again

‍I keep coming back to eggs.

‍I was egg obsessed as a teenager. I used to make them all the time when I got in from my evening job late and hungry. Then somewhere, when what we are expected to understand as ‘real life’ got hold of me, I started making eggs for everyone else, the way the liked then because they were fussy and I could eat them their way to save fuss. Then I forgot how I liked them. Not all at once. Over time. And then I forgot that I even had the right to have a preference.

‍Knowing how you like your eggs sounds trivial. It is not. It is the beginning of the whole thing — the practice of noticing what feels good to you, what you actually want, what restores you rather than depletes you. Not from a place of selfishness. From a place of wholeness.

‍Because a woman who knows how she likes her eggs is a woman who knows herself well enough to come back to herself when she drifts.

‍And Seneca was right.

‍That kind of love — the quiet, practiced, eggs-exactly-how-you-like-them kind — grows back more easily than almost anything as long as you give it time.

‍You are not starting from scratch.

You are just finding your footing on the grass. And the grass teaches your shoulders to be stronger, your core to engage more, your focus to be sharper. You are stronger once you nail the same skill in a more difficult environment.

‍Love is the same.

‍You are adding strength to your self worth every time you lose yourself and then find your way home.

‍ If you are somewhere in the middle of finding your way back, The Way Home is my book about exactly that. It is almost ready. You can find out more here.

‍And if you want to start now, the Nervous System Reset is free and it is a good place to begin.

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