Free Stop Being Mean to Yourself: A Story About Finding the True Meaning of Self-Love by Melody Beattie

and with all thy soul and with all thy mind . This is the first and great commandment . And the second is like ... unto ... it .'"
    Nichole stopped struggling with the thick text and just looked at me ." I didn ' t know they talked like Valley Girls back then ," she said .
    " Keep reading ," I said .
    "' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself '"
    " Most people don ' t know how much they hate themselves ," she said a short time later .
    I agreed .
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    " When you tell people you don ' t like yourself , they just scrunch their face and say things like ' How can you not love yourself ?' Or they say ,' I don ' t understand that because I really love myself ' But then you look at them and you know that ' s not true . They hate themselves , too . They just don ' t know it .
    " It used to bother me why some people had to go through so much pain in life and be so aware of it , and other people were just happy to go bowling ," she said , almost as an afterthought ." For a long time , I thought maybe we were being punished for something . But now , it doesn ' t bother me anymore ."
    " Why ?" I asked .
    " I don ' t think people who have a lot of pain are being punished ," she said " I believe they ' re the chosen ones ."
    I finished my bagel and reached the security checkpoint seconds before a tour group of about one hundred Japanese travelers arrived. One of the security guards, a woman, pointed to a lane on the right and told me to stand there. She lined the tour group up in the lane next to me. Then she began checking them through first. I looked at the line next to me. This was going to be a long night.
    I motioned to the security guard.
    "Actually, I was here before them," I said. "It's late. I'm tired. And you told me to stand here. But no one is checking me through. Am I in the wrong lane?" I asked.
    "No, you're not," she said. "Please come with me."
    She led me to a table removed from the crowd, at the
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    far end of the room. On the other side of the counter stood two uniformed women. They both looked like college girls. One of them, the one with shoulderlength chestnutbrown hair, did all the talking.
    She started by asking simple questions: how long had I been traveling, who was I traveling with, what was I doing, an American woman, traveling alone. To each of my answers, she responded with an unemotional "I see."
    She asked to see proof that I was a writer. I said I didn't have any. She wanted to know why I didn't bring any of my books with me. I told her I had considered it, but I had already over packed and had no room. She asked why I had come to Tel Aviv and who I was seeing or meeting here. I told her no one, I was changing planes, not leaving the airport; it was a stopover on my way back to the United States.
    Then she returned to the subject of proving I was a writer. I showed her a few pieces of paper, letters to and from my publisher, and some faxes concerning my work.
    "What have you written?" she asked.
    "Hundreds of newspaper articles," I said. Shit, I thought. Wrong answer. "And eight books. The one I'm best known for in my country is Codependent No More ."
    "What's that?" she asked.
    "A miracle," I said.
    She just looked at me.
    "It's about learning to take care of yourself when the
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    people around you would rather you didn't because they want you to take care of them. And so would you—rather take care of them instead of yourself," I said.
    "What's the name of the book you're working on now?" she asked.
    " Stop Being Mean to Yourself . "
    "What does that mean?" she asked.
    By now, I felt singled out, persecuted, angry. And mean. How could anyone, even her, not know what that meant? Convinced she was deliberately tormenting me, I took a deep breath, leaned closer, only inches from her face, and began talking at her.
    "We live in a world that's very meanspirited," I said.
    "There's a lot of it going around. People are scared. They don't know what to expect. But the problem is, in a world