Becoming a friend to yourself.

The antidote to our cultural malaise? Plus, a psychological ghost story!

It’s Suicide Prevention Month, which is being broadcast loudly this year as the U.S. continues to see record-high suicide rates. We’re all familiar with the most likely root causes, those “losses, separations, and humiliations” brought on by fraying social fabric. The loneliness epidemic, political and racial tension, an inept healthcare system, and lasting impacts of a global pandemic continue to bear down on us. “Suicide rates often decrease during a crisis…only to climb as individuals attempt to cope with, and adjust to, the long-term effects,” shares Rhonda Schwindt, professor at The George Washington University School of Nursing. The same could be said of dealing with the aftermath of a personal health scare or diagnosis, I think to myself, remembering the blissful naïveté of total uncertainty and chaos in the weeks when I truly thought I was about to die (for good) at any moment…and then the long, bitter months of unraveling as I kept surviving, and realized I would have to learn to live in and with my new reality.

As post-sudden-cardiac-arrest volunteering and paid projects take me further into the mental health field, I feel like I’ve been drafted into the war against loneliness and despair. It isn’t a fight I would like to be fighting, per se, but this is my country and it’s the fight before us. In my efforts to listen deeply to those stuck in crisis, or who struggle to keep stress from ruining their closest relationships, I start to notice a trend. Whatever else is wrong, there is a common refrain of self-abhorrence and self-dismissal. The worst loneliness and disconnection we face isn’t, perhaps, from others. Most of us, most of the time, seem to have lost the ability to be good friends to ourselves. Is it any wonder that depression and even suicidal tendencies are growing?

I imagine my readers starting to tune out one by one. Self-love again, ugh! I know, I know. In some ways, it’s the oldest, most tired topic in the book. And yet we humans are so utterly and universally poor at it. The more I thought about my own slow recovery process from health shocks and chronic illness, the more that a lack of self-worth and self-care seemed like the core theme.

“I thought self-love meant that I should eat a chocolate chip cookie and take a bubble bath. I didn’t understand how to change my relationship with myself,” states psychotherapist Carissa Karner in her TED talk, The Art of Being Your Own Best Friend. I feel seen, hearing this. I listed baking as the first step in my safety plan when I was experiencing near daily suicidal ideation soon after cardiac arrest. So baking became something I did several times per week in the first few months of 2023. As I continued to feel increasingly overwhelmed by circumstances, I became addicted to the emergency crutch of producing sweet desserts. Now, long after I need to bake for safety-plan purposes, I’m still struggling to learn how to respond to life’s normal ups and downs with tools that don’t involve measuring spoons and refined sugar. What was next in my toolkit? Epsom salt baths. I’m currently writing this article IN the bath, just FYI. So I’m not knocking sweets or long hot soaks, to be clear. But are these things really self-care?

After delving into No Bad Parts, an Internal Family Systems manual by Richard Schwartz, I started thinking that caring for myself like a true friend probably involves welcoming my whole self and learning not to alienate my more problematic sides. Think of someone you love dearly, someone you’re always excited to be around. Don’t their quirks help make them who they are, as much as their talents and polished skills? Wouldn’t you say their raw, imperfect moments speak to their soul and your connection as much as (if not more than) their successes and worldly achievements?

Is what I just described the same way you look at, or judge, yourself?

“People say you have to learn to love yourself before you can love anybody else. But it’s not true. I loved everybody before I loved myself,” says Karen Faith on the TED stage in How to Talk to the Worst Parts of Yourself. Loving those I like has always been easy. Loving strangers with whom the only thing I share is our human predicament came next. From there, I could ease into loving my enemies, at least some of the time, by offering them the same nonjudgmental well wishes I do strangers. Nowadays, I can go facilitate group treatment for those with domestic violence convictions and see them as full and complex humans who are ends unto themselves, with every ability to change and grow. Sending generous care their way is just a part of loving life, of loving Nature, of loving my World.

But loving myself?

As I’ve paid more attention to it lately, I’ve been amazed how immature my attempts at self-love are. I seem to view myself primarily as a tool, defined in terms of her use value for…I don’t know. Accruing utils? I take “care” of myself in the sense that I maintain my car—doing the bare minimum tasks to keep it from becoming a problem for me. And I wait until the warning lights start flashing, every time. When I’m sick, I’m annoyed that my physical vehicle isn’t working reliably to get my bossy brain where it wants to go. When I’m sad, I immediately try to “fix” my feelings. I tell myself: “Eat a cookie!” or “Go on a run!” Or I take on some new crazy project. I do anything, really, but feel those pesky feelings and listen to them deeply, as if they matter. I do anything but sit with them in respect and acceptance like I would a good friends’ feelings.

Even objectively healthy activities, I’ve found, can be done either in a self-befriending way or a self-punishing way. A week ago Thursday, I did the latter sort of hike. It was late-August hot, my least favorite hiking weather. I knew the bugs would be thick. I thought about taking it easy and walking around the neighborhood, but I wanted to distract myself from thinking about various ways I’d been imperfect and human lately. I didn't have time for my own grief or worry. MUST SEEK MORE UTILS! And failing that, I wanted to be so tired I had bigger problems. Problems I create and control, instead of problems that are amorphous and beyond me.

So I forced my way through a nearly 9-mile hike that afternoon. Along the way I saw a big black bear, which my therapist tells me is a symbol of protection. I remain unconvinced. Because in the last mile of that terrible hike, arm muscles sore from four hours straight spent waving buzzing gnats out of my face, I tripped on a downed tree and fell over like yet another downed tree. I landed flat on one side of my body. Hip and elbow collided with sharp rocks, earning me some impressive bruises and several days of pain. I stumbled out of the woods that last .75 miles with tears streaming from my eyes, two clear and salty paths through the dirt and sweat on my cheeks. I thought of what an old friend told me his dad used to say, whenever he showed sadness: “I’ll give you something to cry about!” I felt keenly the harshness of having given myself something to cry about, something bad enough to distract from normal but uncomfortable emotions. I felt the sting of that self-harshness for a while, even after I’d rested and iced, and after I’d realized that I’d also contracted a hundred itchy chigger bites in my fall.

I wear a necklace this year with the word “soften.” Unlike words I’ve chosen in the past, I struggle to subscribe to my 2024 word. I often feel like it’s a joke more than a motto, given how little progress I’ve made towards living by it. It sits around my neck like an albatross, not a gentle reminder, and there are very few days I do anything resembling softening towards myself. [See what I did there? I beat myself up about beating myself up! Starting to grasp the predicament?]

There is one thing, I’ve discovered, that works—at least, some of the time. What works is going all the way back to step one of love: listening.

I’ve sampled many different types of meditation and prayer since my cardiac arrest to try and recapture the all-encompassing silence of ceasing to exist as an individual entity. Usually, I’ve tried to listen to that which is outside of me—the darkness of death, the lightness of living, the cyclical throbbing and chirping of Nature.

One day recently, I noticed something else outside myself. I didn’t know I’d noticed it until I voiced to my brother (in passing) that the ghost I sometimes reference, the ghost of the life before my heart stopped for 24 minutes, is literally something I experience to the right of my body, just behind my shoulder. She’s a “she,” and she has some loose shape the way a bright light burns a shape onto your eyeballs that you can’t quite draw accurately. I realized this, and the bizarreness of it, at the exact same time I said it out loud. The sensation of her presence wasn’t what was new; only my acknowledgment of it was.

Something changed after the ghost moved fully out from my unconscious and/or subconscious mind. Once I knew she was there by my shoulder, I could listen to her. She wasn’t constantly around in a distracting way, but I could call her up at will. In the next few meditation sessions, I came back frequently to my consideration of this ghost. Mostly, I just let her be there. I showed her I was interested in anything she had to say. I asked her questions, such as “what do you want me to learn?” And, “what do you need?” I didn’t ask her to go away; that never occurred to me. But eventually, after she didn’t seem to answer my questions, I asked if she would like to come inside. By that, I suppose I meant to reconnect and come back into my body instead of hanging out there on the periphery of our shared system. I can still picture her as she was, right behind my shoulder. But I haven’t felt her there since I invited her inside. I take from this that she is home. Meanwhile, something shifted in my listening sessions.

What would it mean to love myself unconditionally, to be my own best friend? It might have a lot to do with acknowledging the ghost that stepped outside so that she could get my attention. If I carry her in me now, can I turn that same level of care towards myself? I attempt to redirect my meditations inward, following the ghost.

Self-love, for me, isn’t a cookie, a bath, a hike, or anything at all that I achieve or make by my own efforts. It’s a feeling that I have a right to be here. It’s a feeling that I belong—all of me, all the parts that have so far worked together to keep me alive, to die, and to live again. It’s a faith that there’s something in me that will hold even if all else fails. Even when all else fails.

I am sometimes asked (by individuals, or you know, by Fox News) whether my cardiac event changed my religious beliefs. I’m still working out how to answer that. I was always spiritual and never quite religious, and that’s still largely true. I see far more similarity between faith traditions than differences, and something I deeply subscribe to is the Quaker notion that there is “that of God in everyone.” Perhaps the early Quaker, George Fox, who suffered bouts of depression and despair, popularized this idea because he knew that only by finding the universal inside himself could he learn to be his own friend and navigate his own difficult journey.

I choose to believe that my wayward ghost was part of God/Nature/the Universe, standing there to get my attention and then leading me back inside. Showing me how to be kind to myself the way I was kind to her.

Some of the most considerate, loving strangers I’ve ever met were telling me via text that they wanted to end their lives because it would be better for those around them. What if we all showed ourselves—our deepest, our most diverse, and even our most problematic selves—the same level of caring and concern we show others? What if we all felt that there was that of God in us, and that we had a right to be here?

Also: has anyone else with a short clinical death or near-death experience ever seen their own ghost? Please tell me I’m not the only one.