What Do We Do When We Can’t Love Ourselves Today?

Here goes a rather difficult confession I and maybe you need to make to yourself.

Self love is easy to write about, all you need to do is put nice sounding words one after the other and fool your reader into thinking that its as easy as skimming through those observations and adopting them.

The truth is that self love is hard to teach, but easy to describe. Our brains can agree that self love is important, they could even encourage the pursuit by following orders, making an effort and simply saying that you have found self love. Then a negative thought comes creeping, hidden amongst a group of well meaning criticisms. The negative thought just like a positive one acts like a seed, one that could grow in the right environment. And slowly sometimes without our intentional attention the thought festers and makes friends with one or more of our insecurities, it hides itself under a positive change agenda and the roller coaster begins.

The point of this is not to tell you how to practice self love because to each his/her own ways, methods and skills. Self love looks different to each one of us. Sometimes it is allowing ourselves those weaknesses and self proclaimed defeats only to see that we are never perfect. What we can aim for during those moments of shattered emotions or confusing thoughts is forgiveness. Sometimes we have to learn to like ourselves before we learn how to love.

So in this space I allow myself to look at the cracks within me, and you to see yours. We piece together what we see fit to carry on, learning and leaning on the faith that we can and ought to get better. We are so flooded lately with self love, self help, body acceptance, and every sort of thoughtful trend; which is absolutely incredible but also sometimes unfortunately quite difficult. How can you still hurt yourself although you are surrounded by so many trends of love and acceptance? Well, you can, and that’s OK if you acknowledge how it makes you feel.

It really trickles down to two big buckets that we get to throw over our heads at the end of each day. Think of them as bucket (a for angel dust) which contains all of the magic water that allows me to become better today than I was yesterday, and bucket (b) which contains the equally magic water that keeps me set in my painful old ways. Except I will not tell you to shower yourself with bucket (a) daily. Sometimes my friends, a good splash of bucket (b for bull sh*t) reminds us of why we chose to become better. And after that sh*t shower we just dry ourselves up with a towel and call it a night. Tomorrow we can try again. And slowly we might get some of (a) and some (b), until we become more capable of paying attention to ourselves and our thoughts.

So whether you feel the love or not, what matters really is that you have that purpose of love for you and others; and with purpose my dear reader comes discipline, and with discipline comes achievement.

Some days it helps that we take it easy and find a mellow place to like ourselves, LOVE comes later; it always does.