Our culture seriously distorts the concept of love and what it really means.

A lot of us go through life, saturated with the notion that "love" means a particular set of feelings - usually intense, pleasurable, and supposedly easy to recognize.

But the truth is that love rarely feels like that - and it's important to know what love really feels like, because when it comes to our relationships with ourselves, we might not experience that sappy, strong, gooey mushy feeling often. Or at all.

And we may believe that means we don't love ourselves - but that's not at all true.

The truth is, love feels like many things.

We might be angry - at ourselves, at someone else, at circumstances, you name it. Maybe anger doesn't feel like it could possibly be connected to love at all. But anger - at least, on our own behalf - is often a reflection that we are not getting something we feel like we deserve. And the implications of that are vital. First of all, it means that somewhere, deep down, no matter how poor our self-esteem or how much our conscious thoughts refuse to agree, we feel like we deserve something. Something good. Probably something better. That means worth.

And anger surfaces when we feel like our innate worth is being denied or challenged. It's a protective instinct - and it's rooted in a deep, sometimes-hidden love. For ourselves.

Similarly, feelings like grief and loss have non-obvious connections to feeling love for ourselves. Losing something (or someone) is a hard experience. But the mere fact that we mourn our own losses means that, somewhere, we feel like we should have good things in our lives. Good people.

Wanting good things for someone is a sign of love, and grieving when those things go away is also a sign of love. We don't mourn because we're worthless, we mourn because we know we are worthy.

Doubt, anxiety, fear, and even despair all have these tethers to love as well. We get concerned about bad things happening (or good things not happening) because, again, we recognize somewhere inside that we deserve to not experience bad things, and should experience things that are good for us.

All indicators that some part of us loves us, no matter what our brains are trying to say.

As paradoxical as it may sound, numbness and withdrawal are also gestures of love. We don't want to experience hurt, but if we can't figure out why we're hurting, sometimes just trying to make the feelings stop is all we can do.

What's more loving than being willing to do something desperate, just to stop the pain?

So many of us are even taught to be angry with our brains and bodies, as if they're at fault somehow. But they're not. They're just trying to do the best they can to keep us alive and make sense of whatever the hell we're dealing with in our time on this earth - stubborn, relentless, constant acts of love, even if they go wrong more often than we'd like. And the frustrations that often come from that are, yes, again, rooted in love - a desire for more harmony within ourselves, for better quality of experience for ourselves.

We can spend time learning to recognize all the ways we secretly have always loved ourselves - the ways we show up in haphazard, ineffectual, sometimes cryptic-feeling attempts at love, every single day.

When we commit to learning to understand ourselves this way, we can begin, little by little, to turn that into action. We can start to solve the problems that our maelstroms of conflicting emotions and thoughts and physical ailments seem to subject us to.

And it turns out, given enough time, we can rearrange the way we understand how we feel. Even rearrange parts of our lives. And beyond that horizon, there's plenty of intense, pleasurable, and easy-to-recognize love, too.

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