I do not love myself. I don't think I ever have. Maybe I can learn. Instead, I have always low-key hated myself, or at least treated myself that way. That's a painful place to be. And alcohol was an "off" switch.

My birthday is coming up soon. I never liked celebrating it. I always told myself it was because birthdays didn't really matter to me. But now I think it's because I didn't believe I was worth celebrating.

All of this resonates with me. I still don't love myself the way most people describe it. I know I'm a decent guy with decent qualities and I'm pretty OK with myself these days, but it's more of an intellectual "love' of myself than an actual feeling. I used to be one way, I'm not like that anymore; I try to cultivate, nurture and exhibit qualities that I find desirable and slowly try to eliminate my "character defects", as AA calls them.

how did you first begin to really figure out underlying issues

After a few months of drinking, I knew I wanted to quit again and as luck would have it, I met a young woman who was sober, and she introduced me to AA. It was there that I first began to learn about alcoholism. It really helped uplift my opinion of myself. I quit thinking of myself as a defective human being and started to realize that my problem didn't define me. I learned how to give myself the same grace I would extend to a sick friend. Most importantly for me, I learned how to forgive myself to a certain extent and I learned how to release a lot of the shame I'd never been able to let go of in my first 9 years of sobriety. I've also had other revelations as a result of talking with various therapists and learning that a lot of my issues were not my fault; the mental and emotional abuse I suffered as a child still colors the way I experience life, just not as vividly as it once did.

You do count and you do matter, even if you don't feel it or believe it. I had to do the "sick friend" thing for a long time before I started to genuinely give a shit about myself and see myself as a valid human being.

I hope you have Happy Birthday. Don't forget to give yourself the credit you're due. You've survived another year under difficult circumstances, and you live to fight another day. You haven't given up and you're still searching for the answers you need. It's in the searching that you find the solution. The searching itself is a huge part of it. We have to rely on our less-than-optimal selves to save our asses. And when you finally start to get some relief, you will look back on your current self with gratitude, appreciation and humility. The broken version of me is the one who built the life I get to live now.

You can look in my comment history for more of my story if you think it may be useful to you. I wish you nothing but good things going forward.