The process of self-love is not pretty. To actually love and accept yourself, you will have to dismantle the walls around your conscious perception that you have been carefully constructing since the day you were born. You will have to let go of the fantasy of who you would like yourself to be and step into the truth of who you actually are. You will have to dig your hands into the unknown depths of you and pull yourself up to the surface, look yourself in the eye and say “Okay.”
It is not a pretty process because it requires you to get dirty. At times, it will feel like your skin is disintegrating. At times, you will feel disgusted. At times, it will feel like the tears will never run out. At times, you will surprise yourself. And at times, it will even be fun.
It’s not about calling yourself a goddess, or king or queen or majestical being. It’s not about lying to yourself in another direction and saying things you don’t believe. It’s simply about sitting down in the darkness and choosing to make peace with whoever appears. It is not a pretty process.
It takes courage, it takes practice, it takes time. Above all, it takes trust that beneath it all, you are actually kind of okay, that you were never worthless or broken or whatever else you’ve been telling yourself this whole time.
Perhaps the hardest part of learning how to love yourself is learning how to stop hating yourself. To be understanding when you want to judge. To be curious when you want to judge. To be compassionate when you want to be cruel. To stay when you want to run.
I cannot emphasize this enough — at first, every nerve in your body, every thought in your mind will resist. Because self-loathing is comfortable. It’s comfortable because it’s familiar, and the familiar is safe because it’s predictable. People usually choose to love themselves when they have no other alternative.
Loving yourself is a constant choice. It’s a choice you make every time you fail at everything I mentioned in this post and every time you let yourself down because you will always find a way to let yourself down. It’s about lowering your expectations of yourself to align with where you actually are. It’s not about liking who you are. That comes later and maybe it never does.
It’s about taking a breath and reaching out a hand to yourself even when you don’t like yourself, when you’re sick of yourself, when you don’t want the version of you that has fallen to the ground — and pulling yourself up again, looking yourself in the eye again and saying, “Okay” again and again.
That said, self-love is not your get out of jail free card. It is not your permission to forget about others. Quite the opposite. Loving yourself is about taking accountability and responsibility for yourself whenever you make a mistake and being bold enough to accept it without self-deprecation or self-punishment. It is not accusing yourself of being the worst thing that could have ever happened. It is seeing and accepting what went wrong and why, and then remedying it at the root. It is integrating both your faults and your innocence.
Above all, choosing to love yourself is about choosing to believe that the you you will find in the filth is worth finding. It is not a pretty process. But, it’s also not that bad.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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