How to love yourself

It seems the experience of self loathing hits hard with my readership (I think it hits hard with most people, at least the ones I know). We’re all out here doing our best in so many aspects of our lives, and sometimes doing our best leaves us ground down to stubby little nubs of a person. One foot in front of the other takes us somewhere, but it doesn’t always take us somewhere where we like ourselves at the end of the day. Self love is a fucking hard thing to do when there’s….so much else that has to get done.

Cultivating self love is my spiritual growth edge. It’s uncomfortable and it brings out the eye rolling teenager inside of me, but I am apparently now an ADULT and I am doing it ANYWAY! Luckily, I don’t have to do it alone. Many people recently wrote to me about how they work to love themselves. Here’s what I learned:

1. My friend Liam says if you are still here, you have some semblance of self love.

   Many people opt the fuck out of living, and no shade to them because I do understand how at times that can seem entirely reasonable. BUT! If you’re reading this, you’re here. Maybe you’re here just barely, maybe you think you’re surviving out of spite. That’s cool, but my sources say probably there’s a tiny crumb of self love in there, too. Some little piece that keeps you going. Sometimes the tiny crumb is all we have, and I think it’s worth appreciating.

2. Self love isn’t linear, nor is it something that exists in totality.

   I would venture to say that it is healthy to be attuned enough to the world around us to identify the shit we need to work on. Sometimes doing that means disliking parts of yourself. I read a book once (The Language of Emotions) that said guilt and shame can be functional emotions because they tell us when we have crossed our own boundaries. Guilt and shame are the closest emotions I can think of to self-hate, and they have functioned both terribly and beautifully in my own life, depending on the time. Disliking aspects of the self can help on the journey to self love, because this is our inner psyche telling us the things we’d like to change. If we get stuck there, you will certainly find emotional, spiritual or physical death— but if we can take the next step, where we go might be somewhere good.

3. Boundaries are the sincerest form of self-love.

   Vulnerability can be self-love. The trick is finding the balance between the two.

4. Engaging in pleasure is self love

   and engaging in discipline can be, too.

5. Self-love and self-esteem are different, but related.

   Self love is appreciating yourself and enjoying your own company. Self-esteem is an evaluation of your worth based on accomplishments. As a 12 step guy, I’ve heard “if you want self esteem, do esteemable things” about a million times over. Working on self-esteem can lead to self-love, though it is very useful to be able to love yourself in times when you haven’t acted esteemably, too.

6. My parent friends might have a slight edge on self-love.

   So many of my parent pals identified a profound love for their wild, curious, weird, screaming, imperfect children. And then they remember their own wild, curious, weird, screaming, imperfect childhoods, and they can almost feel that same love for their kid selves, and by extension their adult selves. I hadn’t thought of this! To love people can help you love yourself and if you’ve had some hand in raising them, of course it would compound. I think it’s time for me to get closer to some children (no, I won’t be birthing them.)

7. Sometimes self-love is just defiance.

   Fuck that mean piece of shit inner voice, fuck not being instilled with an intrinsic sense of lovability, fuck the society that tells us we are not good. We are good! Or at least we can be.

8. We self-love by surrounding ourselves with those who love us in action

   and not just in words. This is easier said than done.

9. “The incredible lightness of not spending so much time hating yourself feels like something akin to love”

   My friend Hannah said this, and it was very good as is, so I did not edit. It’s true, self hate takes up so much time, so much brainspace. I think a lot about the eating disorder I had through much of my 20’s— a profound and refined expression of self hate. Through a lot of trial and error, I truly don’t have an eating disorder now. The space that exists from not body checking, counting calories, sneaking around, weighing and measuring my food, exercising ‘til I puke—- god, I really have done so much with it. If I could get rid of the other little insidious self hate things—the ones not food related— oh my fucking god. I could cure cancer. Start a dog rescue. Write a million more novels. It is self-loving to have a strong and driving desire for our time.

I’d like to leave you with something my friend Maria said. Maria is a genius and loves bogs more than most people love chocolate and peanut butter, which is really saying something if you’re me, an adamant chocolate and peanut butter lover. She is so cool. Anyway, here’s what she said:

“I like this line of thinking: I am the same as the lupine that will bloom in a couple months and the squirrel outside my window. Small, insignificant, ephemeral, but here now, full of life, beautiful, precious, expendable, catching a sun beam, eating extra to stay warm during winter, full of preferences, aging inexorably. My world and my nest is just as meaningless and just as meaningful as the beaver’s, the famous person’s, the big leaf maple. I know we are way more complicit in inflicting harm than the plants and nonhuman animals, but yet. I can sometimes catch a glimpse even in the haze of media and concrete and tech of the preciousness of these other lives, and of my own also.”

I think I love myself more after typing all of this. Times are so hard, but people— people are fucking precious. You, and you and you, and you…and maybe even me.

Thanks for reading.

Until Next Time,

Luca

Here are a few things I’ve read lately that really make me happy.