Self-love was a weird concept to me for a long time. I was convinced it was a tool of The Patriarchy in cahoots with the Eat Pray Love crowd to distract women from more important issues, like disappearing funding for diseases primarily affecting women, the glossing over of women’s suffrage, and that women are still paid less than men for doing the same work.
The fact that diet culture seized on self-love as a way to push their “weightloss-as-health” approach affirmed my view that the whole thing was a giant conspiracy.
Plus, growing up in a church environment, loving yourself was framed as selfish and sinful. The thinking goes that we humans already love ourselves too much, and therefore, the more radical thing is to love others more and put their needs above our own.
So for years, I treated the self-love movement as fake and unnecessary.
And then I started therapy.
What is self-love?
While love comes in many forms, we all generally accept that real and unconditional love implies action. It’s something you choose – sometimes minute by minute – and is based on who someone is, not what they do (or don’t do).
Self-love is similar. Contrary to what I learned in church, self-love isn’t about being full of yourself and thinking you’re great all the time. Self-love is “our ability to see ourselves as a flawed, imperfect individuals and still hold ourselves in high regard.”
It means you actively embrace the fact that you will mess up sometimes and that failing doesn’t make you a failure. Being kind to yourself in this way is key to practicing self-love.
And though self-care is important, it’s not the same as self-love. Self-care describes things we do as a result of the love we have for ourselves. It’s saying, “I love myself, so therefore I will do this face mask/take a hot bath/go for a walk”, etc.
How I realized I wasn’t truly loving myself
My therapist recently sent me self-love exercises to practice. The first exercise involved looking into my own eyes in a mirror and saying affirmations like “I choose to see clearly with the eyes of love and I love what I see” and “I truly love you and accept you” out loud to myself. Then, I was to journal about what the exercise brought up for me.
I couldn’t do it. It felt way too uncomfortable and intimate. I actually wrote in my journal that I would never try it again.
The next time I saw my therapist, I confessed to failing the exercise. She told me that I didn’t fail, as I had in fact journaled about how the experience made me feel. Then, she invited me to do a self-love meditation with her.
The meditation guided me through visualizing my newborn, 5-year old, 16-year old, and current adult selves and sending them various affirmations, like “I wish you peace” and “I wish you a life free from suffering.” I was fine for the newborn and 5-year old versions of me. But when visualizing 16-year old me, I broke down.
That was the age I developed my eating disorder.
I didn’t send 16-year old me any affirmations. I didn’t think she deserved them. It dawned on me that even though I now feel a lot of compassion for her, part of me still thinks she should have known better.
I knew my bulimia wasn’t my fault, but I realized that I still didn’t believe that all these years later. So the self-love affirmations felt impossible, because I didn’t think that part of me was worth forgiving – and thus, not worth loving.
Why self-love isn’t stupid
Wow. Is everyone still with me? I know that was a bit heavy.
I’m sharing this because I think it’s important. This is why self-love isn’t stupid, and goes deeper than face masks and bubble baths (though there is nothing wrong with either of those things). I was a teenager in pain trying to handle something I didn’t understand or have a language to express. That didn’t make me unlovable – it made me human.
This realization – that self-love and forgiveness are core to the human experience – has finally given me a starting point.
You are worth it
We live in a world that likes to post LOVE YOURSELF in fluffy pink font on social media, yet no one tells us what that looks like. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s actually really messy and takes a lot practice.
The next part of my journey involves extending myself some much-needed grace. It’s telling myself I deserve that grace, and that I am worth the effort it takes to heal and love myself.
And if there’s one thing I want you to remember from this post, it’s that you are also worth the effort.
