Pip: Welcome to SDAW: SoDakArtists Way — where the creative life gets examined from the inside out, sometimes uncomfortably so.
Mara: SodakArtist has a piece up that goes somewhere most posts don’t — inward, deliberately, across years of solitude and self-examination. Let’s start with what it means to spend years alone and come out knowing yourself better for it.
My Significant Other Was My Inner Self
Mara: The post opens with a deceptively simple question — how did you meet your significant other? — and then refuses the easy answer. Six going on seven years single, a marriage that ended, and a slow realization that solitude wasn’t a punishment but a classroom.
Pip: The post earns that framing with a line that stops you cold: “how to be alone without being empty, and how to love myself without needing someone else to prove that I was worth loving.”
Mara: That’s the spine of the whole piece. Everything that follows is an unpacking of what that actually required — not the self-care shorthand, but the harder version.
Pip: And the post is direct about the gap between those two things. Self-love as a concept gets thrown around pretty casually, but the post draws a real distinction — facing the parts that hurt versus just making yourself feel good for an afternoon.
Mara: The piece works through that distinction across four dimensions: mental, emotional, physical, and relational. On the mental side, it’s about separating belief from fact — asking “is this actually true, or have I believed it so long it simply feels true?” On the emotional side, learning to look beneath the reaction to find what the feeling is actually reporting.
Pip: Emotions as information rather than commands. That’s a reframe that takes years to actually use.
Mara: The relational section is where the argument sharpens. The post draws a line between compromise and self-erasure, between supporting someone and losing your own identity trying to keep them happy. It asks honestly where that line had been crossed in the past — not to assign blame, but to understand where self-protection had failed.
Pip: There’s something quietly radical about the ending. Not a resolution, not a relationship found — just a person who finally knows the difference between being alone and being abandoned.
Mara: The post closes by reframing the original question entirely. The significant other it describes isn’t someone waiting out there. It’s the inner self that survived, questioned, and kept moving — the part that was present through every hard year.
Pip: Which makes the whole piece less about being single and more about what you build when there’s no one else to build it for you.
Mara: The territory here is interior — identity, solitude, what you discover when you stop looking outward for confirmation.
Pip: Next time, more from that same interior landscape. Worth staying with.
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Hi Sodakartist, I’ve been pouring over this post. One thing I may be eating into the ideas is that before sound relationships can really work, a person has to know and love the self? Is that right? the other thing I’m getting is that loving the self is work… Question: Can one ever truly love oneself?
That is correct a person needs to know and love themselves before they are truly capable of giving true love. People can fake it and believe it to be love all day everyday actually most people do this but they lose parts of themselves that should never have been lost in the first place. They lose boundaries that they had for themselves that should never have been crossed thinking they did it for love well that is wrong if the person loved you, you would never have had to cross those boundaries in the first place or had to drop parts of yourself.
Loving yourself can be extremely hard especially later in life because you have to understand who your true self was before you lost other parts or molded over old parts to protect yourself and became harder. Getting rid of new forms can be just as difficult as finding the old parts of what makes you actually you.
I believe people can truly love themselves. Yes we do change, yes we do grow, but don’t put a mask on for someone and call it love when you can’t even figure out who you were and meant to be in the first.