It’s Time to Love Yourself

stock photo by Michael Fenton

We put off mending our relationship with ourself much longer than that with any other person because there don’t appear to be immediate, external consequences. The effects of not loving ourselves are mostly internal, much more painful, and much harder to address because all of society is telling us we are doing the right thing by judging ourselves and finding ourselves—our bodies, our choices, our very personalities—falling short of expectations. Capitalism is built on our not loving and accepting ourselves. Generations of people have made fortunes on the backs of the self-deemed unworthy. We are bombarded with images and messages all day every day that tell us we are not enough, and we believe them. We buy into this so completely that many of us do not even realize the damage it does, do not see that there is a problem, and do not try to fix it. Many of those who want to fix it don’t even know where to begin. It feels like a monolithic task to love something that we don’t think is worthy of our love, to unravel and drown out the messages of a chorus of millions and to replace it with a very small voice that tells us we are enough.

Well, let me add my voice to your tiny internal choir of one: you are enough. You are worthy of your love. You deserve your love. In fact, you need that love in order to survive, and you’ll never thrive without it. You need that love to heal all the damage that has been done by the outside voices and the larger, louder inside voice that sings with them. You cannot heal by thinking through your wounds and the external offenses that created them—you will only heal by loving yourself, loving those wounds, and loving how they got there. It seems impossible, but it’s not. Start by reassuring yourself that you are enough, that you are powerful, valuable, and worthy of your own love. You may not believe it at first, but you will feel the walls starting to crumble over time. Send love to the walls, to the wounds, to the strength that created those walls to protect you. Push gently. Go slowly. Be persistent. Be relentless. You are worth it. 

(Originally posted October 6, 2018)