Please Tell Me You Love Me

Salma Ahmed

Spotlight Editor

After midnight, deep into my Instagram explore page, I came across a dark humor meme which enlightened me to the concept of external validation addiction.

As someone who takes much pride in living in my own reality, detached from all that is going on around me, I was in an utter state of shock to find myself nodding to a lot of what makes someone an addict to external validation.

My emotions, my actions, my appearance and even my thoughts have all become flawed until being validated by an outsider.

I seek my mom to validate me as a daughter; my friends to tell me I am good enough; and my editors to tell me I am a good writer. 

Does my constant need to be told I am doing well qualify me as a narcissist? I always branded myself as an empath and the polar opposite of a narcissist. I hide from the spotlight and spend my days thinking of ways not to be seen.

We preach about not being judgmental but we severely feel the need to be judged. Being judged means that someone bothered, that someone spent their time to reach a conclusion about you.

Our childhoods were spent fearing judgment and learning to not let it impact us only for our adulthood to be spent chasing judgment, even if in the form of an approving nod from a superior we don’t even like.

I no longer feel loved, successful or good enough without someone validating those feelings on the regular. Wrong? Probably.

Whenever one of my many writing pieces goes live, I wait for feedback. No matter how proud I am of what I produced, I can’t help but feel that praise means my work is as good as I believed it to be.

The absence of praise is a sign of my failure.

Even on social media, I brag about using it for my own pleasure and not in an attempt to gain followers, likes, retweets or whatever appears on the platform for the public. I know what would get attention and I consciously avoid that, yet still can’t help the disappointment that washes over me anytime I refresh to the number of likes remaining the same.

I share my most bland thoughts on twitter, in the form of grammatically incorrect fragments and run-on sentences. Yet still, I secretly always hope to be the owner of the next viral tweet. Even a single retweet or like is enough to make me feel that my thoughts have been validated.

I have become obsessed with checking the activity on each of my sad, lonesome tweets.

This can’t be healthy; and I am sure it is even unhealthier that I deny that I have sunk to this level 

I wait diligently for someone to tell me they love me, love whatever it is I do, and love whatever decision I make.