Your love is suspicious, for I do not deserve it.

Those words sit on my chest like a wet coat. They are not dramatic for me; they are accurate. Not because a stranger told me so once, but because I keep proving it to myself — in the small, honest places where I can’t hide. In the ways I’ve spoken (too loud, too blunt), in the ways I’ve lashed out when sleep and food and safety ran thin, in the ledger I keep of all the times I failed to be the person I promised I’d be. I am not trying to be poetic about it. I am trying to be honest. I do not feel deserving. I do not feel lovable. I feel, frequently and without softness, like an unlovable monster.

That line — monstrous — it is not only about the things I’ve said or the ways I’ve hurt. It is tactile. It is the body that betrays me: the panic that ladders up my throat, the heart that wants to run away in my chest, the stomach that turns to acid and fires when the world asks for endurance. It is the meltdown that arrives like a storm I didn’t call, hair pulled, head banged, the vocabulary turning brittle and sharp. It is the education I never finished, the money that isn’t there, the ways the world insists on measuring worth in certificates and zeros in a bank account. All of it compounds into the same whisper: not enough. Not safe. Not lovable.

And yet — and here is the contradiction that keeps me awake and keeps me writing — I love. I love like it is oxygen. I love the people who are messy and mean and divine. I love the ones who take wrong turns because I have seen what makes people break and I refuse to become the sort of person who throws them away because they’re damaged. I love the person who lies because something in them learned survival from deception. I love the person who hurts others because someone hurt them first. I love the exhausted parent, the addict, the bureaucrat who forgot how to be human beneath the memo. I love them regardless. Always. Infinitely. Without ledger or condition.

Why? Why would the person who believes themselves a monster become the librarian of everyone else’s mercy? Because I have been taught — by absence, by punishment, by quiet abandonment — that love is a trap, that kindness has strings. So I made my answer the opposite. If the world uses care to control, then I will use care as a refuge. If the world weaponizes truth, I will make my truth into a harbor. If the world taught me I am undeserving by handing me only conditional affection, then my answer was to make my affection unconditional. Not because I don’t see the harm. Not because I excuse the hurt. But because I have lived enough in the cold to know how it singes you when people say they love you and then leave when you stop performing the right version of yourself.

This is where Ethicism sits in my chest. Ethicism is not a manifesto that tells other people how to behave; it is the map I use so I don’t get lost in my own instincts. It is the vow I make to act with conscience even when everyone else is doing calculus with the rules. Ethicism is the refusal to let cruelty be efficient, the insistence that care without a cost is not care but calculation. It is me choosing, over and over, to meet others with compassion, even when it would be easier to close myself off. It is also the reason I am so cruel to myself.

Do you see the loop? The system taught me to watch out for cruelty disguised as care. I responded by turning my care into something holy — so holy I refuse to apply it to myself. That refusal is its own punishment. I spend my days being the kind of person who will not let someone be alone with suffering. I also spend my nights thinking of every small failure and announcing it like an altar call. I will stand and shield and defend and then go home and tell myself I am unworthy of the warm hands I just held.

There is power in hypocrisy — or maybe clarity is the better word. I am not pretending I don’t notice the contradiction. I notice it in everything. I notice it when I want to offer grace to someone who has done harm, and then want to set myself on fire for a single sentence I said years ago. I notice it when I promise someone nonjudgmental space and then cancel my own therapy because I am convinced I don’t deserve the minutes. I notice it in the way I can write an Ethicism essay that argues compassion like doctrine and still be convinced I am outside the scope of its mercy.

So what do you do with this? (You — meaning me; and you, the reader who perhaps lives in similar contradiction.) You do the work I do not have the heart to promise will be neat. You hold the truth and the contradiction at once. You do not lie to yourself about being unlovable. You also do not weaponize that self-judgment as a moral high ground that lets you offer the world unearned charity while withholding it from yourself. You allow that your ethics are real and useful and necessary and also that they do not automatically entitle you to self-absolution. The balance is brutal. It is also, perhaps, the honest path.

I do not yet believe I deserve love. I cannot fake that. There is no staged revelation at the end of this post where I suddenly bloom into belief. The truth is the truth: there are moments when I still think, in the small hours, that everyone who loves me will wake up and decide I am a bad investment. I am scared of the abandonment that comes with being human and imperfect and loud. I am sometimes afraid that my meltdowns will be the thing that finally tips someone over. I am afraid — by the way I have learned to be, after years of proving my safety by being useful — that safety is an offer that is rescinded when I stop performing.

And yet I hope. I hope because hope is the only spiritual practice I can afford. I hope because every time I thread care like a rope through someone else’s life and it holds, I see proof that unconditional love is not a myth. I hope because Ethicism is not only a policy; it is a practice in small, repeatable kindnesses that change the ledger slowly. I hope because I have met people who stayed when I expected them to leave (rare, like sun through clouds, but real). I hope because the contradiction — loving everyone and believing myself unlovable — keeps me watchful in a way that could, someday, be re-directed inward.

I don’t know if I can unlearn this base line: I don’t deserve love. Maybe I never will. Maybe my whole life will be a negotiation with that line, a daily, minute-by-minute argument in which sometimes I win and sometimes I lose. If that is the truth, then I will keep my ethics. I will keep being stubborn about care. I will keep being the person who loves even when the world trains me otherwise. And on the days when the coat is heavy and the whisper is loud, I will try, timidly and awkwardly, to point the kindness I offer outward back at myself for five minutes. Not to prove I deserve it (I am not ready for that lie). But to practice the motion of it. To practice that my hands can hold me without crushing.

If nothing else, Ethicism taught me how to refuse cruelty as a mode of efficiency. Maybe, in time, that refusal can be extended inward. It will not be swift. It will not be dramatic. It will be a series of small experiments where I test staying in the room when someone offers affection instead of walking out. Where I keep a record — not of all the ways I failed — but of the times someone’s love didn’t evaporate when I stopped being tidy.

For now, I will keep my contradictions like a houseplant I water when I remember. I will keep loving everyone — because it is my counterweight, my way of refusing the world’s cheap cruelties. I will also keep telling myself the true, hard story: that I do not feel deserving. That this is a wound. That it might never wholly close. And all of that can sit together. The ache and the ethic. The suspicion and the stubborn, relentless capacity to give. There is no tidy moral here. Only the slow practice of being human and the small insistence that even if I am convinced I am unlovable, I will not let that conviction make me cruel.

As always, I love you all.