I am most comfortable feeling less than.
Well, duh! Join the club! That's what makes it so hard to learn to love oneself. But you're as lovable and as loving as the rest of us. As a human being, you're not less than any of the rest of us.
Congrats on your sobriety. You know better than I do how difficult that is.
*****
The problem with reconnecting intimately (and I'm not talking about sex) with LD is that your history together has created a large set of strong connections in your brains, some of which are unhealthy. It's like an addiction; hell, love may BE an addiction. In any case, you'd both have to be very careful for a long, long time, IMO.
How would building a new connection with LD be different from the new connections people who R make? Well, in fact there may be no significant difference - but my gut says the D makes a big difference. But some D'ed couples reconnect, and some of those reconnect for the long term. No matter what the probabilities say, no one can predict what a specific couple will do.
But that's neither here nor there - it's an opinion with without reliable evidence. What counts now is your continuing to heal yourself. What that brings, you'll have to see.
You've definitely gained some good insights. You're definitely making many good choices.
It's time to see yourself as redeemable. That doesn't mean redeeming yourself will be easy - it just means it's possible. And seeing yourself as redeemable will probably make it more likely you'll keep up the necessary work.
But ... you know ... at least some people here have no doubt that you're redeemable. At least some people here see you as being on the road to redeeming yourself, and we're probably right.
*****
Redeeming yourself - living a good life - doesn't change what you did. It changes what you do and will do.
fBH (me) - on d-day: 66, Married 43, together 45, same sex ap
DDay - 12/22/2010
Recover'd and R'ed
You don't have to like your boundaries. You just have to set and enforce them.