Learning to Love Myself
...and then not interfering with that love!
I love you, Jane. I love you, Jane. I love you, Jane.
The voice woke me. Tucked alongside me in bed were the warm tummies of three snoring kitties but there was no other human in the room. It had been another night of bad sleep. Two hours. Possibly three. I’d been living like this since the aftermath of head and brain injury had kicked in several years before.
In 1998, I was in a furniture showroom on Madison Avenue when the rope snapped on a huge tabletop mounted on the wall. It had fallen on my head. One by one, I’d lost my senses, which had gradually returned. And I’d had a massive laughing attack: A table fell on my head, I’d repeated over and again as if nothing funnier had ever happened to me.
As hard as it is to fathom, in those days the general public, and even many doctors, understood very little about head and brain injury; it would be years before the soldiers and football players were all over the news. So after a long wait in ER, I’d simply left, certain I’d be fine. And the fancy Upper East Side doctor I saw the next day who didn’t order a CTscan, MRI, or Xray agreed.
I was not fine.
The following days and weeks and eventually years brought memory loss (couldn’t find my way home from a block away), vertigo, debilitating head pain, racing heart, feeling as if I were underwater, heightened sensitivity to sound, lost words, inability to follow conversations or instructions or to sleep more than a handful of hours or to drive, and a necessity to narrate everything I was doing inside my head. Once vibrant and expansive, my life had become narrow, isolated, and often frightening. And doctors were dire in their predictions. One told me that I’d better enjoy the health I currently had because when he saw me in a year, I’d only be worse. “Injuries such as yours only go in one direction,” he’d declared. I did not book a second appointment.
Instead, I took on the untakeonable. I leaned into the tenacity I’d inherited from my parents who grew up in London during the War, with bombs dropping all around them. I didn’t allow myself anything but fight and the dogged belief I would heal. I went up against doctors who said I would only get worse and painstakingly figured out my own care. I stretched beyond Western medicine into Chinese medicine, cranio sacral work, massage, biofeedback, acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, and naturopathy. My days became marathons of healing protocols. I took daily Epsom salt baths. Experimented with EFT, booked sessions with psychics. My cupboards overflowed with supplements. A long-time vegan, I introduced eggs to my diet. I learned to cook. I danced. I walked my neighbor’s dog, who knew the way home. I listened to interviews with people who had healed from the unhealable and took notes. Above my kitchen sink, my dad posted three dots and a dash: Morse code for the letter V, echoing Winston Churchill's World War II–era V-for-victory sign. Like my British ancestors, I, too, would rise again.
I stayed alive due, in large part, to my staggering grit. I carried myself through one terrifying day after another.
And slowly, over many years, I began to heal.
And yet, despite healing beyond what doctors thought possible, these were the words that normally filled me—whether verbalized or the pounding looping drive of thoughts: “What is wrong with you? Why can’t you heal faster? What are you doing wrong to still be sick?” As if I could trash-talk myself into full health.
I came by this self-punishing protocol honestly. I was raised in a loving and supportive household where there was almost always a “…but.” Plus, a family member spent the years since my injury attempting to convince those around me that despite the severity of the accident and the well-documented fact that my symptoms were consistent with head and brain injury, including how long term and all-encompassing they were, I was completely well and faking it all for attention. And because I’d grown up in the generation that valued boys’ opinions over girls’ even about their own bodies, and, coupled with the part where the first decade of my symptoms had manifested when nothing about head and brain injury was common knowledge, there was a part of me that feared he must be right.
So these two internal voices, fear and cruelty, entangled into one seamless drone that boiled down to these five words: you’re doing it all wrong.
And now, this: I love you, Jane.
I recognized the scratchy undertow, the quick trot, and the earnest delivery of me. This voice professing marrow-deep love was my own.
I gazed at the ceiling. What little sleep I’d mustered had taken place on my back as the vertigo was severe enough that once I laid down, I had to stay stock still to prevent the room from flipping and spinning.
The voice had stopped but its gentle persistent earnestness lingered the way the touch of a beloved stays on the skin.
Where had it come from?
I hadn’t been practicing affirmations: they tended to make me feel worse about myself--my life was about minute-by-minute survival, hopeful words about my circumstances only highlighted how far I was from health the way I once knew it. I wasn’t in therapy. It was the days before Zoom and I couldn’t drive; plus, I didn’t have money for as much. Everything went to doctors and practitioners and basic living expenses for me and my kitties. And I hadn’t offered any prayers for help to the universe. I felt beyond help. I felt there was only me.
And yet there I was, exhausted, my nervous system buzzing, terrified to face another day: gently, persistently loving myself.
Stirring my oatmeal, doing my alignment exercises, grading papers, all day that voice lingered. It was foreign to me: seditious; almost dangerous. These concepts weren’t off-putting: I’d spent my teens and early twenties at underground clubs, punk concerts, and alternative schooling immersed in a world keen to rise against the establishment—though I didn’t yet realize my doing it all wrong voice was of the establishment, birthed from the oppressive mixture of misogyny and capitalism. But the love voice was also deeply comforting and hopeful. This was the part that frightened me. What would happen if even a glimmer of anything soft were to meet the hard edges of my will to live?
I woke to the voice the next morning. And the morning after that. My sleep remained scant and fraught. Over the years, I’d become frightened of going to bed. The blow to my head had impacted both my nervous and endocrine systems, so when my circadian rhythms should be calming down, they were instead ramping up. I would lie in bed wide awake, my awakeness stronger than the strongest supplements and even the strongest pharmaceuticals that I dared to try. But now I found myself longing for bed just so I could hear that voice.
Years before this, when my health first collapsed and I went from living a life of dining out nightly, vacationing with friends, dating, boxing, and writing for legacy publications to one of great isolation and an unreliable body, I began saying my name out loud. There was no plan to this. It happened at random times: doing the dishes, having yet another bath to ease the pain, lying on the damp grass or sometimes the snow in my garden because the earth urged me. A friend recently suggested I was calling myself back into myself, back into my troubled body so I could heal, and perhaps I was. But at the time, I just needed to say my name.
This morning voice was also a calling. It was a reminder that within my busted body and brain, I was there, exquisitely present and resolute in my love.
I needed this voice. I blamed myself for my bad health. The accident that had uprooted my life had not been my responsibility. Despite the lack of information available to me at the time and the inadequate care of the doctor, I blamed myself for not knowing better. I also didn’t sue, which was a mistake, but I had no notion of the staggering medical bills that awaited me. I blamed myself for not knowing things I couldn’t know, things not available on the news, in the fledging days of the internet, or being shared by doctors. I blamed myself for not knowing what my future held. I blamed myself for not healing faster, for not healing fully.
And now this love voice had appeared. Or perhaps had always been there and I, at last, could hear her.
I wish I could say on the fifth day or tenth or even the sixty-seventh, I rose from bed and was cured. This didn’t happen. I still struggle with my health, though much less. What did happen was I listened to the love voice. I didn’t ignore her or make fun of her or ask her to leave. I didn’t say she didn’t know what she was talking about (I intuitively understood that she did) or diminish her or tell her that the never enough voice knew more and that she should acquiesce to him. I took her seriously. And she came to me more frequently. She pledged her love as I sipped my tea in the morning, as I fed the birds, as Ortiz and I became covered in snow on one of our long walks. Sometimes she sang to me in an easy, melodious tenor, washing over an early spate of the scolding voice, softening its imprint to mud.
With time, she rose fierce and capable, bright with wisdom, certitude, and compassion, and quieted the doing it all wrong voice, now surprised and confused, by simply repeating I love you, Jane every time it spoke. She didn’t try to reason with this voice. She didn’t attempt to scold its scolding or belittle it or even silence it. She simply met every word of beratement with love.
And I didn’t interfere.
The news out of Los Angeles is beyond all sorrow and devastation. One way to help from afar is through donations. The Pasadena Humane has been helping countless animals and sharing their donations with other shelters in need. Greater Good Charities has a variety of wildfire fundraisers going. This is one for animals in need of medical assistance but there are many more.
Sending gigantic love to our LA Family. ❤️
May kindness rain down on the planet and all her animals.
Next week: A beautiful interview with Cynthia Weiner on her dazzling new novel A Gorgeous Excitement. Inspired by Robert Chambers’ murder of Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986 (aka the “Preppy Murder”), Cynthia pushes back on the slut-shaming headlines that followed and offers us a tender, insightful exploration of growing up in that time amongst that crowd. Kirkus Reviews gave it a starred review. Town and Country included it on their 36 Must Read Books of Winter 2025 list. I’m excited to share this with you!
If you enjoyed this essay, you might also enjoy this one about intergenerational war trauma:
Jane, the heartbreak and the heart-mending in this piece are so beautifully juxtaposed. Thank you for allowing us into the beautiful complexity of your mind and your soul here. I'm so sad that your life was so upended by a freak accident, so upset that you had to live with such resolve, and also so moved by your tenacity and the fact that you called yourself home.
Jane, I'm so sorry for what you've been through. Absolutely horrendous. What a beautiful thing is your love voice. I have been through the wringer in the last few years, and the last few weeks especially difficult (nowhere near as awful as you have suffered) and reading your post made me realise I need to listen to my own love voice. We are all so quick to condemn and blame ourselves, when we should be kinder. We would do that to others so why not to ourselves? Thank you for that sage advice. Sending much love and healing to you.