It’s easy to love yourself when you’re feeling productive.It’s harder when you’ve been procrastinating for four hours and you feel like any move toward doing something constructive is a slow crawl through thick mud.
It’s easy to love yourself and feel like a MF temple when you’ve been eating fruit and vegetables like there’s no tomorrow.
It’s harder when you’ve been downing sugar like a kid at a birthday all weekend. Or when you wake up hungover and run your furry tongue along your teeth and lie in bed for the next 8 hrs wrapped in your duvet like a human burrito, half-dead with the smell of other peoples cigarettes in your hair and reliving every embarrassing thing you’ve ever done.
It’s easy to love yourself when everyone loves you and you feel accepted by your community.
It’ harder when you feel like your views, your decisions, or even your body is somehow wrong, or overwhelming, or too loud, or too whatever.
It’s easy to love yourself when you stand up for injustice like a warrior and feel righteous and passionate and full of fire.
It’s harder to love yourself on the days you can’t fight. Because you’re tired, or sad, or done with the world and all the people in it right now.
It’s easy to love yourself when you commit a good deed.
It’s harder to love yourself in the moments you looked away, when you stayed quiet, when you hurried along and pretended not to see. When you did not give someone the time of day because you were in a rush. When you could have offered assistance, but didn’t. When you hurt someone without meaning to.
It’s easy to love yourself when your house is clean and the sheets are washed.
It’s harder when you can’t see your floor anymore because it’s covered in clothes and you’re wearing bikini bottoms for panties and you can’t bear to face the Mount Everest of clothes piling up in your basket.
It’s easy to love yourself when someone else says “I love you” or “I can’t stop thinking about you.”
It’s harder when someone tells you “I want you, but not enough” or they slice you through the stomach with the six-word sword: “I just don’t love you anymore.”
But in every single instance, in every single shadow as in every single beam of light, you are worthy. There will never be a time in your life you are not worthy of self love.
Self love is not conditional. It is not something you only grant yourself when you feel like you’re doing life “right.” It is fiercely championing yourself, holding yourself with reverence, through every single iteration and chapter. The introspective bits, where you turn inward and are scared at what you see. The slow bits, where it seems like nothing is moving forward. The dark bits. The sad bits. It is all opportunity for learning and growth and expansion.
You are allowed to fall in love with the reality of who you are, now, right now. Not some future projection of yourself that is tidier, more successful, and never makes mistakes.
You are not broken.
You do not need to fixed or tweaked or upgraded in order to be worthy of love.
Love is not something you need to earn from anyone, least of all from yourself.
Ok?