A matter of doubt

on Normal People by Sally Rooney

Connell and Marianne spend their lives searching for a love they had been refused while growing up. Marianne, in particular, seeks a singular kind of validation: She admits, at one point: “He tells her she’s beautiful. She has never heard that before, though she has sometimes privately suspected it of herself, but it feels different to hear it from another person.”

Too often I hear that we must love ourselves before we love another, yet Marianne was able to express some manifestation of love despite her inhibitions. It is a great privilege, I think, to seek inner love and receive it painlessly. It’s hard for me to believe that one can exercise love without ever being shown it. It cannot be learned in a vacuum. After all, we all yearn for reciprocity. We all doubt and question our worth, and it is only survival instinct to seek external validation. But at what point are we finally convinced of our worth, and will we ever be the final judge?

I think about how I was raised: My father spent countless nights reading us bedtime stories, and my mother never failed to send us to school with toast and a glass of milk. My sister readily shared her insecurities to ease my own; and my dearest friends, having seen me most obnoxious, still shone a light through the cracks. I’ve been unbelievably lucky. And yet, unkind words and thoughtless acts still break my spirit, silently piercing the resolve I’ve painstakingly built over the years.

I’ve always found this rather stupid. But I stop to remind myself that my mind is the cruelest of any juror, and we do ourselves a great injustice by never seeing ourselves from the eyes of those that love us. I remember then that I have been fully equipped for the act of love. I have been shown kindness and respect, and to reciprocate is an elementary deed. It’s an unending cycle, I think. New insecurities emerge, doubts accumulate, anxieties grow torturous. It is human to seek validation elsewhere, to ask to be shown love and kindness as one would ask to be taught a new language. “For a human being, nothing comes naturally,” the ever-rational Philip Pullman once wrote, “we have to learn everything we do.”