You Don't Think You Deserve It
Thoughts on Love is Blind & self-sabotage
Hello everyone! It’s been a while. I’d love to say that I’m so in tune with my mind and body and chose to take a planned break last week. In reality, other work kicked my ass and forced this to the back burner so here we are. Sorry friends! I’m in the middle of rearranging some things so I can make it through the rest of this year without letting this newsletter fall by the wayside – let’s call this my only New Year’s Resolution.
Alright! Let’s get into this week’s essay.
Are You Ready for What You Want?
The discourse got me: I’m watching Love is Blind. It’s been years since I watched the series, which has only gotten increasingly bleak ever since the rare lighting in a bottle connection between the franchise’s flagship couple, Lauren and Cameron, who got married in the first season. But the conversation surrounding this year’s season featured a cast of characters too messy for me to pass up. A Megan Fox lookalike (depending on who you ask), the Bob’s Burgers character she wants to love her, and the mulleted meathead she jilts to get him? How could I possibly resist?
It wouldn’t be Love is Blind without a couple who’s plainly a trainwreck in the making, and this season it’s Chelsea and Jimmy (Megan and Bob, as mentioned earlier). Chelsea and Jimmy’s coupling is most painful to watch because it comes at the expense of Trevor, who has a pretty good head on his shoulders, despite and/or because of his mullet. Trevor’s sure about Chelsea from the beginning, though these people are “dating” via talking to each other behind a wall in Wayfair-furnished pods and dranking, so I’m not sure how much strength that statement holds. But it’s worth noting how Trevor never wavers in his affection for Chelsea, most notably when he learns of her divorce. It’s a sharp contrast from how Jimmy deals with the same information, becoming distant and failing to offer the reassurance that Chelsea wants.
Here’s where things start going off the rails. Jimmy breaks things off with Jessica, a single mom he’s also connected with because he’s not ready to give step-daddy. Fair enough. Jessica gags him by telling him he’ll be so sick the first time he sees her, he’ll need an EpiPen, which is a smidge iconic of her, I have to admit. Jimmy then proposes to Chelsea after she heavily implies she looks like “MGK’s wife or girlfriend” or whatever – Megan Fox – which is a particularly daring resemblance to suggest to an American male who saw Transformers during his formative years. It’s clear in context she’s using this to bait Jimmy into a higher level of commitment; she's the one who brings up the conversation about looks by asking if people tell Jimmy he looks like a celebrity, then feigns like she doesn’t know who Megan Fox is when drawing the comparison between them. Chelsea accepts his proposal, but once they see each other in person it’s obvious Jimmy’s not physically attracted to her. In fact, he says straight up that “she lied” about looking like Megan Fox, which…actually, I’ll let you see for yourselves:
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Chelsea launches straight into my man, my man, my man territory – but to be honest, it’s not terribly clear that she’s all that attracted to Jimmy either. What is obvious is that she’s thrilled at having been chosen, and she’s especially ecstatic about having been picked over Jessica. Chelsea’s insecurity becomes more extreme and harder to stomach in following episodes, especially once she reveals she’s been cheated on several times in the past. Her desire for male validation leads her to play cool girl; she’s quick to join in and sexualize AD, another woman in the cast, with Jimmy. This comes after he tells her that AD’s “stacked”,” which is so disrespectful and nasty she should’ve chopped him right then. She also regularly prompts Jimmy to compliment her appearance in several instances that he sidesteps so pointedly it made me itchy.
It’s obvious that the knowledge that she’s “competing” with Jessica makes Jimmy’s stock go up in Chelsea's eyes, but the rush from winning is flimsy and illusive, not strong enough to withstand the weight of a real world relationship. The issue here is that Chelsea’s not ready for what she truly wants – a healthy, stable relationship where she can be confident in her partner’s love for her – so she goes for what she knows, searching for fulfillment by winning the worthless attention of a man with a wandering eye and self-sabotaging her connection with Trevor in the process. Though her mind tells her she wants love, her ego wants to be fed: she wants to be picked after not being chosen repeatedly by past partners. She’s expecting a self-love deficit to be filled externally, and all the affection in the world from a partner isn’t going to do that (and, to make matters worse, Jimmy’s not even giving her affection!!)
Chelsea’s predicament made me think: am I ready for all the things that I say I want? Are you? Are we doing the work to be prepared for them when they get to us? In some parts of my life, the answer is unequivocally yes…for others, I’m just a girl, okay? For Chelsea, the connection she wants is staring her right in the face (figuratively), but she messes it up because she’s not ready for it yet because of her own feelings about self-worth. No one can say whether Chelsea and Trevor would’ve been the perfect match, but we can guess that she wouldn’t have to keep looking over her shoulder for the other woman she seems certain is going to appear. Even if she’d gotten with Jimmy for another reason, she’d have been strong enough to cut him off when he first started acting goofy, because she’d be free of the desire to be chosen by a man because she’d already chosen herself (corny, I know! But this is what it means to act in your own best interest).
But without doing the necessary internal work, choosing yourself is almost impossible. Instead, self-sabotage rears its very un-Megan Fox-like head, self-destructive tendencies popping up followed by the predictable consequences we swore we didn’t want. Of course, this makes it easier to do the already easy thing: giving up, accepting you’ll never have what you want (even if it’s because your own actions are making it so.) This is why self-sabotage is so dangerous; it erodes hope because it drags us back to the very situation we’re trying to escape. I’ve written a lot here about romance and relationships because of the nature of Love is Blind – and there’s a reason that “right person, wrong time” debates continue to rage on social media. But the truth is if you’re not ready for what you claim you want, you can play yourself in any facet of your life. You can fumble a great opportunity at work by letting imposter syndrome creep up and giving into self-deprecation that makes others doubt your abilities. You can self-sabotage a fitness journey by holding yourself to an unreasonably demanding routine so that when you inevitably take a misstep, it becomes a spiral all the way back to square one.
Ultimately, it all comes down to really feeling that you’re deserving of the things you want, but getting to that point is the hard part, considering all the messaging we get telling us that we are not. The messaging around us constantly says you have to look and act and dress a certain way to be worthy of love, to make a good living, to experience joy, to be in community with others. But this isn’t true. You simply have to be ready, and being ready means taking the steps to be prepared. It’s like going on a trip: you don’t wake up the morning of, drive down the airport, and just take off. You check the weather where you’re going, buy the things you need, pack your bags, and get your hair and nails done (if you’re bougie like me). In other words, you do what need to ahead of time so when you arrive at your destination you’re ready for the experience.
This is why I’d argue that thinking you’re deserving is less a feeling than it is an act. To get there, you have to deal with your shit, which means being introspective, taking accountability, changing your behavior – I mean, yuck! But that’s how we make sure we’re ready for the love when it arrives, for the job when we get it, for the friendships when we attract the right people. Of course we all trip up and succumb to old patterns, but we have to keep retraining ourselves, recalibrating our mindsets – I can’t imagine how heartbreaking it is to realize in hindsight you had everything you ever wanted but were too wounded to accept it. Can’t be me! So instead of struggling with feeling deserving and self-sabotaging, I’ll be channeling that energy into developing a raging God complex instead. Men do it all the time!
With that in mind, I’ll leave you all with this:
That’s it for this week! Next week I’m back with the February Brain Dump for paid subscribers, where you can get more of my thoughts on the insane media landscape we’re living in alongside the tea on everything I’m watching, reading, listening to, not buying, and obsessively ruminating on. I’ve fallen deep in a Beyoncé phase, as I always do when I need to unlock a higher level of discipline and action, so I’ve been thinking a lot about her career trajectory and what it means to be a thoughtful risk taker, so a piece on that might be coming next Sunday…we’ll see!
See you then,
Lola xx
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