On the intersection of love and shame

You’d think someone as starved as me would be craving love.
And I do, one some level.
But as I reconnect with my body and my feelings more and more, I am realising that love feels like a dirty word.
Even worse, self-love. I think of it, and I cringe.
It fills me with a terror that is only comparable to your car falling over the cliff, full speed, with only slow, torturous death beneath you.
So you could say my nervous system likes to exaggerate.
For people who have experienced love to be dangerous, is there ever a way out of this cycle of self-pity and dread?
Could I unconditionally, effortlessly, love myself? I dare think so.

Maybe I haven’t been given the causes and conditions to love myself until the end of my life. 
But I sure as hell have been given enough to love myself today.

Buddhists believe in karma, the law of cause and effect which describes the endless transformation of all impermanent phenomena.
The bucket that people with happy childhoods and loving parents draw from hasn’t been given to me. But something has. The very fact that I am still here, sharing, feeling, loving (which was not a given), this has a cause too. These have effects too.
And while self-love is almost too unbearably too big for me, I can break it down.

Maybe being loveable, worthy of love, of holding and giving, forever – is too much. Maybe I could just try it until the end of this article, or this hour.
Maybe it can be a dream for now, until I forget that I am dreaming.

When I was little, focusing on surviving rather than thriving, I played pretend.
I pretended I didn’t have needs, I didn’t jump at the slightest noise, I was cool and likeable and funny and nothing more than a facade. Which I then tried to fill with drugs and sex and jobs growing up.
But if I was able to act that role until I fully merged with it, why not take up a new part? If the Buddhists are right, and there is no inherently existing self, picking up a new script should not be too difficult.
I just need to remember my new lines, and see how it goes.