Self-Erasure Is Not Love (The Gift Comes First)

 Welcome back. Welcome back, welcome back. 

I never get tired of the drum of the guitar of that intro music that I had written specifically for this podcast. Back in what? 2021? 2020. Ugh. To me, that element, the vibe of it, it has maintained a match even through the various iterations. 

So welcome. Welcome to 2026 to the new year.

To the new season. To all the goodness, to all the newness. Welcome to this. Evolution of the podcast because if you're here listening, then you're probably like me. You're ready to have a lot less of the people pleasing dynamic in your life, and you're ready to challenge and release that  shit.  There is so much deliciousness and so much depth and just a ton of disruption I wanna bring into this space so much.

That I wanna share with you. So let's get started. 

When I was a child, it was a record in my mom's LP collection. It was white and it had a single compelling black trek sketch of a wolf on it, often at Christmas and also at Easter. Um, but usually at Christmas my mom would put it on the turntable. The first story on the record, it's actually the only one that I remember was about a bunny, and I have to confess, I cried every single time I heard it.

I mean that literally, I don't remember ever getting through this story without my eyes welling up with tears, not as a child, not as a teenager. Not even as an adult. The story hasn't just followed me. It lives within me. It's woven into the depth of my being, and it often fits right here in my chest. This year, this Christmas season that just passed, I, I found myself really longing to hear it not.

Out of nostalgia, I think not exactly. It was more like something in me needed to sit with that story, needed to sit with that thread. I don't have the album anymore. It's long gone with the rest of the collection. I do have the CD version and I did look rather frantically everywhere in my house in all of the scattered CD collections around my house.

I did eventually find it, but the logistics of, of, um, actually playing a CD version, it hasn't yet happened, so I haven't listened to it. But I do have the book, the story is called Barrington Bunny. When I was younger, what always broke my heart about it was what I understood it to be about. The ultimate sacrifice.

So here's some of the story, some of the through lines of the story, just enough to give you the context. Barrington is lonely. It's Christmas Eve. He is longing to belong and he can't figure out how There are no other rabbits. He knows of no other bunnies that he knows that live in the forest and he can't belong with the family of squirrels because he doesn't climb trees.

He can't belong with the family of beavers because he doesn't swim. He can't belong with the family of mice because they can't hear him through the noise of the blustery wind of the snowstorm. He feels rejected, he feels alone, and by the end of the story, he has given up his life to save another. So while this is a Christmas story, it's also, it also has elements of the Easter story and the way that this story for most of my life, that in my body.

Was simple and devastating. This is what love looks like. So the younger version of me,

love means giving yourself away. Love means disappearing without being seen. Love means being willing to be erased, erased so that someone outlives. Even if I couldn't have explained it back then, this is how that is. How this story, this very present story from my childhood that has stayed with me. That's how it shaped my understanding of love.

It reflected my understanding of love, and that's why I cried, cried for the loneliness for the unseen. The belief that goodness meant being willing to disappear. That grief, that sat deep in my chest, it caught in my throat, and it inevitably slowed down my cheeks. And here's the thing, when I read the story again this year, through the clear, through the long pauses.

The moments where I couldn't even read the next sentence, I noticed something, something new and nuanced. Something that, something that I had never heard before. And once I noticed it, I couldn't unsee it. It was like a new thread suddenly becoming visible, like a curtain being pulled back. And I began to realize.

That there was something vital in this story that I had missed as a child entirely, but I missed for decades, for nearly half a century. Was this at Barrington's? Lowest point when it's cold outside and the wind is howling when he's sitting in the snow sobbing, biting his paw, crying. All of his might when it's Christmas Eve and he is thinking bunnies aren't any good to anyone if they don't have a family at that lowest point.

He is visited. He is visited by the most beautiful animal he has ever seen. A great. Silver wolf and the wolf doesn't tell him what to give. The first thing that the wolf does is ask him why he is sitting in the snow and Barrington tells him, I don't have any family. Barrington's. Loneliness is painful and relatable.

He says it's Christmas Eve and bunnies aren't any good to anyone, and the wolf reflects something back to Barrington that he had not yet value or reconcile. In his moment of not feeling good enough, he tells him the great silver wolf tells him. That bunnies are good, that bunnies can pop, that they are warm, that they are furry.

Barrington in this moment can't understand how that could possibly be good. The wolf tells him the great silver wolf tells him it is very good. Because it's a gift that bunnies are given a free gift with no string attached, and then the wolf says something that dropped into my being in a way that it had never landed before.

He says that every gift that is given to anyone. Is given a reason. Someday the wolf says, the great silver wolf says, someday Barrington will see why it is good to be a bunny. And when Barrington tells him that he is still alone, that he doesn't have any family at all. The great silver wolf replies, of course you do.

All of the animals in the forest are your family, and suddenly I realized that this story was never asking Barrington to disappear in order to be loved. It was never teaching. That belonging comes as an exchange for sacrifice. Barrington already belongs. Because of who he is and the choices, the loving choices that he makes throughout the remainder of the story, even the ultimate one, they don't come from not knowing who he is.

They come after his gifts were named. After he recognizes his gift, after he recognizes who he's, and throughout the rest of the story, Barrington keeps reminding himself of those truths. It is good to be a bunny. Bunnies are warm and fuzzy. All of the animals in the forest are my family. Barrington belonged because of who he was, and in the end, he refuses to make the ultimate sacrifice, not because he believes self eraser is required, but because he knows who he is and that gift, knowing that the choice that Barrington made.

The way that I heard this story differently this time, it fucking changes everything. It changes the message of what is required to belong. It changes the message of what love gets to look like. The story of Barrington Bunny isn't just a childhood story. For me, it resonates because it speaks. To the very real human longing, the longing to belong, and that misreading the one where sacrifice is born out of self erasure, like stating into the blankness of a snow white background that misreading.

Didn't stay on the page. It followed me. It reinforced how I understood love, how I understood goodness, how I understood belonging. And I think for so many of us, especially women, we are steeped in explicit and implicit messaging that being good means giving ourselves away. We're seeped in the messaging that love requires cost too, and of the self devotion means shrinking.

Belonging is earned through usefulness. That's the dominant story, and when you grow up inside that story, you learn something very. Specific, you learn that it is safer to disappear than to risk not belonging. So you learn to manage yourself. You learn to soften your edges, you learn to anticipate what others need.

You learn to be good, and this is where people pleasing is born, not because you're weak. Because somewhere along the way, love got confused with self erasure. You learned that it was safer to love than believe that you deserve love. And the tragedy is that this kind of sacrifice doesn't, doesn't create intimacy.

It doesn't create safety. It doesn't create safety. It doesn't make space for love. This story, this kind of understanding, this, this confusion, that love requires self erasure, that creates disconnection from ourselves, from our bodies, and eventually, ultimately. From each other, disconnection instead of the belonging that we so deeply long for.

The body knows this truth. When you live in self erasure, your body tightens it, braces, it contracts, it lives on some level of high alert. The body learns to survive instead of belong. And this, this is where the story opens something else for me, because devotion that comes from self knowing doesn't hollow you out.

It doesn't require you to disappear. It doesn't ask you to earn your place by becoming smaller when devotion comes from. Fullness. It deepens you. It allows love that require, that doesn't let me say that again. When devotion comes from fullness, it deepens you. It allows love that doesn't require you to fracture yourself in order to belong.

This is what I'm learning to call. Intimacy, not closeness that costs you your truth, but connection. Connection that allows you to stay with yourself. Love that doesn't ask you to leave your body love, that doesn't require performance love, that doesn't demand self erasure as proof of goodness.

When love comes from that place, relationships reorganize. Not because you forced them to, but because knowing yourself changes the shape of connection. So I wanna leave you with a question. Not something to answer right away. Let it linger, let it land, let it percolate. Where in your life did you learn that belonging required you to disappear and what might be possible?

If you allow yourself to know who you are before you give yourself away,

this is the kind of conversation we're gonna have here. Not about fixing, not about becoming someone else, but about re-seeing and shifting lenses. And letting that change how you live, how you love, and how you belong.

Yeah. If something in today's episode stirred in you, you don't need to rush or do anything. Let it stay with you. This is a threshold.

Linda, I will see you again soon, right here in the No People Pleasing Zone.