Have you ever fallen in love? Like, when all you can dream of is seeing her smiling again. When you look at her unevenly cut hair, and it looks perfect to you, because it’s hers. When you find cute the squeaky noises she makes when laughing, even though that annoys everyone else. You know, she tells about an old lady she met at the grocery, and you hold your breath not to miss a detail. Your friends tell you she’s a drug addict and her convict ex-boyfriend visits her every other evening, and you get angry at your friends, who are lying to you. When they show you photos, you get even angrier, because they are judging a good person who just slipped this one time. You know she is the most beautiful creature inside, if only others could learn to know her better…

Love makes delusional, almost by definition. Its rose-colored glasses make any red flags look white, you can’t escape it. Even in a non-romantic, Christian or humanist sort of love, you are supposed to forgive mistakes, sins, or evil the person did, only then it counts as True Love™. Romantic or not, love involves wishful thinking, and the object of love is a projection of what we want to see on what we observe. Often, the less we know about the loved one, the cleaner the projection screen is, the easier it is to imagine a perfect being worthy of great unconditional love. Your love.

Now, closer to the point. I don’t know about you, but I love myself. Kidding. Of course, I know about you — you love yourself a lot too. Yes, I know, it’s been a complicated relationship, You’ve been with you for a long time, you got angry, made mistakes, caused pain, you had many internal fights, and sometimes it was a real love-hate struggle. You know you’re not perfect, but you care about yourself, you want the best for you, you want yourself to be happy and fulfilled, and you know everything about yourself. Everything. Or so you think.

In self-love, you act as both the subject and the object. You project what you want to be (what you see in yourself) on the observable part of you (what others see in you). The authentic, real you, can be only clearly seen from the outside, because what you see from the inside is a combination of what you want to be with the real you. In other words, it’s not the world who can’t see the whole of you, it’s you thinking of yourself what you are not.

Jacques Lacan called this illusory version of oneself “Ideal-I”. He said that the split between is permanent, and the human existence is a life-long struggle to become what you imagine of yourself. Eventually, reality hits, and you realize you are not what you think you are. The mismatch between Ideal-I and reality causes desire to improve and create, and from some degree causes self-alienation and dissatisfaction. You are your mask, but you can re-shape it to match what’s behind it.