Editor’s note: This entry is part of an ongoing series of personal essays by the author on love and life. You can read here parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7.

At this point in this series, I think it would be healthy to address a topic that is both continuously repeated and yet very overlooked when thinking about the essence of affection, and that is self-love. Like a mantra, every person I’ve talked to about this has told me some variation of the formula of “working on oneself” or “loving oneself“.

For someone that tries to put his mind and soul, his passion in the people, the activities, the ideas and the things I love, I am not a great fan of the idea of self-love, and not particularly because I don’t believe in it, or because I reject it, but because I believe the discourse about it not only vague and meaningless, but also completely twisted in what it means to be.

Those who know me, and take me seriously, know my emotional struggles are as intense as they can be complex. I don’t put a specific tag over them, to try to keep a little privacy about my condition, but the longer I learn to live with them, the more I get to understand their causes, their effects, and their nature, and the more I get to be tired of the same senseless words that can be interpreted so much for issues that cannot be solved with a dose of palliative selfishness.

To go public with such personal information may very well be taken as a self-attack on my own reputation, at least for those who think of appearances as the highest form of social standing. But if lately I’ve learnt something from two great thinkers, as well as remembered something from a cultural influence in my youth, is that there is strength and merit is saying truth to the world, and to show ourselves as genuinely as we are.

So for this topic, to understand the crisis in self-love, the general feeling of melancholy that affects my life, and how it relates to my larger quest for meaning in affection, I would like to introduce British New Left philosopher Mark Fisher, and giant of classic literature, Russian Count Leo Tolstoy. They are going to be joined later on by Belgian musician Stromae.

I chose first both Fisher and Tolstoy for this dive into the complexities about self-love because both of them were vocal and public about their own struggles with depression and meaninglessness in their lives. I chose them for the simple fact that their contributions to universal thought outlived them, even if the circumstances of their deaths were quite special, expected and somewhat lacking for the former, theatrical for the latter.

Because, when talking about self-love, we should talk about life and death, about life’s purpose and its end. Anything that does not consider the finite nature of our existence cannot be an authoritative source on happiness and affection, and anyone who argues about the importance of self-love without understanding the larger systems of belief, control and social bonds composing the human experience cannot be an authority on it, but a prophet of atomistic isolation.

Let’s begin with Mark Fisher, shall we? The famed author of the book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, born into a working class family, was an odd product in the standardizing machine that had become British academia by the 1990s. A colleague of other singular fellows, like the future founding figures of the neoreactionary Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land, and of cyber-feminism, Sadie Plant, respectively, Fisher began his scholarly career as a doctoral student in Warwick, and thus, was also associated with Land’s syncretic and unorthodox Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.

A cultural critic by trade and a follower of leftist postmodern philosophy both by his own leanings and CCRU’s influence (think of Althusser and Slavoj Zizek, but also Deleuze & Guattari, since their two-volume work on Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, was a CCRU required reading), Fisher never took himself seriously as an intellectual, probably due to his own struggles with depression, but took his own depression as a subject serious enough to be one of the main ideas in his work.

Capitalist Realism, published in 2009, is his better-known book, and for good reason: it might be the most comprehensive critique of the cultural consequences brought forth by an uprooted capitalism represented by the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, closer to a certain secular liberal corporatism than to a bona fide free-market conservatism, and, of course, included sections on the consequences of our current political-economic system into general mental health.

However, I think the essays he produced around the time he published his second book, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, might be a better window into his ideas and his insights about the paradox of self-love. One piece in particular, titled Good For Nothing, was my first introduction to his way of thinking through his struggle, and I may have over-empathized with him due to our shared emotional imbalances, despite our generally opposing views on politics.

Like him, I have also felt a sense of meaninglessness in my life, haunted by dreams that weren’t mine, merits I didn’t feel I deserved, jobs I thought to be both below and above for, and a general loneliness that could not be cured by an isolated nuclear family lacking the extended support networks needed to find some solace in the affection of less-than-strangers with stakes into my well being.

Fisher, in a sense, taught me it is ok to write and to come clean about our feelings of uneasiness and our fight for happiness in a world that seems to be brutally harsh to those who lack the permanent, stable and healthy connections to live without fearing abandonment, ostracism and intranscendence.

For me, Mark Fisher is one of those thinkers who were mostly right, but on the wrong side: he understood that “the pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.” He blamed this on the monopoly of capital over society, as it made an economic incentive of isolating struggling individuals to make captive consumers out of them, with large industries, such as the pharmaceutical one, profiting the most from our personal and shared imbalances.

He was right to pinpoint how our current governance model has made of the tragedy of mental and emotional health issues both a stigma and a business, as if the people suffering from them are in the wrong for not complying with a market-defined, government-enforced neurotypical normality that benefits only the bureaucracies of state and big business, and kept in place by the cultural hegemony of the corporate apparatus over a half-educated, functionally ignorant but pretentious middle class, with self-isolated members unable to go beyond these beliefs.

But he was wrong in proscribing communism as its solution, for it has not only continuously proven to be a worse, and bloodier alternative (several genocides in the name of equality, from the Holodomor to Cambodia should be enough) but also one that stems from the same root as the problem, and that is the narrowing of the human experience and of the political into merely the economic, whether in the name of nominally free opportunities into wealth, or its equal distribution for all.

Despite his lucidity, and his ability to play with other concepts in cultural theory, such as the weird and the eerie as depictions of otherness, and hauntology and lost futures (are we living as excitingly as our ancestors thought we would, or have we reduced our horizons as time has passed by?), Fisher lost his battle against depression and died, rather unceremoniously, by his own hand, in 2017, leaving an unfinished book and plenty of published essays into the topics he was passionate about, including the one that caused his dead.

On the other hand, to contrast Fisher and his ideas, there is Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist and author of some of the classics in the canon of Great Books that most educated people might know of, namely, War & Peace and Anna Karenina. He is less known, though, for his radical intellectual conversion into an ascetic, pacifist and anarchic form of Christianity, which put him at odds with the Eastern Orthodox religion endorsed by the Tsarist autocracy.

One can divide Tolstoy’s life and works in two, one before his conversion and one after it, the first marked by his aristocratic upbringing and a delightful prose, many times intertwined with philosophical meanderings that enrich the stories he crafted against the context of a decaying empire.

Even his earliest works, autobiographical novels, Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, reveal a certain Romanticism in Tolstoy’s tension of realizing the differences between his station in life and that of those that served him. It may be very well that these feelings caught up to him later on in his life, despite having rejected them at the height of his literary career as youthful sentimentalism.

He published his two major works during the 1870s, and during that period, he also underwent through a deep transformation in his personal beliefs, culminating in the publication of what I consider might be his most personal and most important piece of “personal” literature I’ve read so far: his 1882’s Confession. (We could also argue that later philosophical and theological writings, in particular his Gospel in Brief, from, 1881, What I Believe, from 1884 and The Kingdom of God is Within You, from 1893 are just as important, but none of them would have come to exist if not for his Confession appearing first.)

This booklet, at least during the short time I’ve been studying it, has resonated with me in a similar level to Mark Fisher’s work: not exactly because I agree with him (although I do agree more with Tolstoy than with Fisher) but because I have been feeling similarly for quite a while now.

Tolstoy wrote his Confession at a point in his life where, despite having wealth and security given the large estate he owned, and despite having achieved fame through his literary works, he felt it was an utter failure. His meanderings about finding meaning in his life had become the cause of a deep depression and the only solution he had found for it was to think about the existence of God, since it was the only idea that could make sense in his ennui and in the incoherence of different conditions people less fortunate than him were living in.

I cannot lie about this: reading Tolstoy’s Confession is a guilty pleasure because it stimulates my own existential despair, already on the edge due to my emotional imbalance, and because it reinforces my Christian beliefs as the reasonable limits to the doubts about my own life’s meaning that grow, treacherous, in my heart and my mind.

Tolstoy turned to God, rationally and willingly, as a way to cope with the half-answers that were provided to him in philosophy, including the Epicurean ideas of living life as fully as possibly in the short time it represents, the argument of ignorance of its moment as a way to make the idea of death more tolerable, and ultimately, of the paradox of suicide, to which he found only possible in cowardice, both as a solution and as the thing it represented, even if logically conclusive.

The kind of self-love Tolstoy found in the conversion that he related in his Confession was mostly a mystical experience that led him to declare, not wrongly, that “God is Life“, but also increased his interest in Christianity to the point he became fully immersed in it, and found in Jesus’ teachings a form of pacifist anarchism as the political answer to the evils he saw sickening the world.

This quickly led to him gathering a group of followers that wanted to spread his teachings, and gradually, he ended up rejecting his aristocratic lifestyle, without stopping his intellectual endeavours, so much that he had even adopted a vegetarian diet by the time of his death, which, by the way was, all alone with pneumonia at a train station to which he arrived after fleeing home over the disputes of his wife with his followers over his ideas and the rights to his publications. In a true eccentric manner, it seems he spent his last hours preaching to passengers and strangers alike in the train wagons.

Just like with Mark Fisher, I cannot say I fully endorse Tolstoy’s politics, even if well-meaning, and not for lack of sympathy, but simply because they don’t fit in the frameworks through which I have come to understand the world. I have made peace with the fact that I can find sense and sensibility in ideas foreign and opposing to mine, mostly because I have bonded over their thinkers over the pain they have suffered in their way through life.

And this leads me to Stromae, who, while not exactly comparable to the greatness of Tolstoy in literature of the insight of Fisher in cultural theory, has long been a musical presence in my life, preventing me from ever forgetting the French language I had been taught since I was a toddler.

Born Paul van Haver, from a Belgian mother and a Rwandan Tutsi father who died in the genocide, Stromae took his stage name from the French verlan slang word for ‘maestro‘, master, teacher. The circumstances of his life also made him quite sensible to the emotional struggles of depression and melancholy, which became recurring topics in his songwriting and have been present in some of his most famous songs, such as Alors On Dance, Papaoutai, and most recently, L’enfer.

I remember listening to Stromae at least since early middle school, there in the French government establishment I spent almost all of my elementary years, and while I did not understand the topics or the meanings of his songs, I enjoyed them enough to make them part of my personal musical taste.

Later on, as I went on through high school in a different institution, and then onto university, I remember I kept listening to him, anchoring my native knowledge of the French language to the hearing and repeating of his lyrics. That is when I began to pay attention to what they actually meant, and fell into this fandom rabbit hole of learning more and more about him as a musician and about his life outside of his craft.

I wish I could say this was a happy experience, but just as this essay is about depression and self-love, so was my experience with his music on the background, and with the French language on mine, which leads into the last section here: my personal struggles with my emotions.

Writing and discussing about what defines our inner lives is certainly a hard topic, and not because it means an exercise in introspection, but because it leaves us vulnerable to external interpretations, that more than often come not with kindness and empathy but with ill intent.

I still choose to do it as a show of bravery, the same kind of bravado these three figures in my intellectual development showed by making public their afflictions in their works, and I choose to do it to extend a solidary hand to all those reading these words that might need to find themselves in someone else also struggling with the unbearable sadness that plagues our lives, despite the good in them.

I try and fail to explain my condition through the memories from my life, looking for clues in the relative isolation of my nuclear family as I grew up, with scarce to no extended support networks to provide me with the affection of relatives or family friends.

This isolation was paired with an overachieving drive I was also taught early on, making me try to strive for the best despite not really knowing why, sometimes to the detriment of my childish happiness and to the added pressure of my teenage years.

The external influences that were around this context of my early life also proved themselves to be downsides, as they corrupted and twisted, up to this day, the kindness and love of my close ones into transactional bonds based on blind loyalties, projected dreams and irrational fears of failure and abandonment that still haunt my dreams and my relations.

I wouldn’t say I had a bad upbringing, but the more I grow up, the more I have realized all those elements that have led me to develop the emotional afflictions that now condition my life and make me struggle with a constant melancholy that manages to mask itself with seriousness until the mask breaks down and tears itself to pieces.

There is a certain sense of dread in my life that I’ve managed to drown with the noise of information, forcing myself to know more, to learn more, to do more, just so the abundance of data my brain needs to process impedes the flow of some of these more intense emotions into my heart and my spirit.

It works until it doesn’t, and when that happens, it directs against itself inwards, like an implosion looking to put me down before it spreads around, but it always does. And when you grew up in a low-confidence context like I did, where the only trustworthy figures were your parents, you become used to distrusting others, self-isolating as a protective measure despite how well-meaning they might be towards you.

This, in turn, creates a binary way of thinking that only reinforces the melancholy that is already present: everything is black or white, good or evil, for my wellness or for my doom. It does not allow for shades or greyscales, where it appears most of our human reality operates, and when it comes to feelings, emotions, relations, it pushes them to the extreme.

When you struggle with things like these, you either give too much and make others avoid you out of feeling they owe you, or you close yourself completely, becoming cold, distant, unavailable. You suffer the lack of reciprocity in the bonds you try to build, and you suffer through the isolation you impose upon yourself as these bonds fail to live out to your expectations.

You overshare and you don’t say enough. You fall heads over heels in love with strangers and you split on your close ones, sometimes antagonizing them irremediably. Such a condition makes life intense but miserable, and even if you manage to make it bearable, like I’ve tried, you always suffer through the struggle of trying to find meaning where you never had any, to try to make it for yourself and failing out of not really known what or who you are, aside from the scarce social bonds from which you built the mosaic that is your personality.

When you suffer like this, even if you obsessively look for love as a solution to all your ailments of mind and soul, the only thing you can find are the ones and zeroes that make up every binary system. It’s either something, or none of it. And sadly, that’s not how life works. That’s not how love nor self-love work.

Life, the lived experience, takes into account all those little somethings and those little nothings that happen in each moment and makes itself through their combination. Each feeling responding to the code, and adapting itself to the situation and the context.

Loving oneself is not merely becoming continuously happy with one’s situation, as in one neverending one that can only be added up to other singular values to increase themselves. Loving oneself, and working on oneself should be more about becoming aware of all those smaller meanings and the meaninglessness that happen at the same time and one after the other. Ones and zeroes. Only that way proper love could develop with people bonding over what they share in meaning and what they don’t in its absence.

It is a hard task. It is a similar existential struggle to the one where finding one’s meaning in life becomes imperative. Some find it in work, in their jobs. Others find it in a passion, or at least pretend they do, like I sometimes do with my writing. It keeps me sane, or so I try to tell myself. Others never find it, and thus are left meaningless to wander through life.

But when it comes to what I feel, and how intense my emotions are in my internal struggles for meaning in life and self-love, these are nothing but the ones and zeroes of my melancholy.