I’m not one to like flowery-sweet language. I can’t watch a Hallmark movie without exuberant amounts of cringe, I can’t read a greeting card without wincing, toxic positivity (yes, thats a thing) makes me want to vomit. It all screams disingenuous to me. I value honesty too much to be able to receive something that is half-baked and insincere. So when someone says something as cliche as “Love yourself” or “practice self-care” or “choose happiness” or posts those barf-worthy inspirational quotes with no nuance, I want to go absolutely nuts on them. The one thing worse than just being positive, encouraging and inspirational all the time is being all of those things without anything practical to say. I don’t think I’m inherently a negative person, despite what my lifelong depression and several mental illnesses would have you believe. I think there is absolutely a place in this world for hope, love, dreams, and ambitions and every person has a right to experience those things. But sometimes those aren’t feelings people are born with, they need to be taught. And sometimes if you’re a hardened asshole like me you don’t need some vanilla-scented, eye-twinkling, polished-to-the-nines motivational speaker to tell you some pretty speech on how to pick yourself up by your boot straps and change everything for the better. That’s not how it works, at least not for me. Rarely, if ever, does one moment actually change someone’s life. It’s the boring slow roll of one decision after another that makes effective change. And while that’s way less sexy than reading a book or watching a TED Talk and immediately feeling better, its more realistic and more sustainable.
I disagreed with one of my therapists strongly when they introduced the idea of self-love. I thought it was pandering and a trendy phrase to try and get people out of depression. What I interpreted the definition of self-love as was a euphoric feeling of acceptance and happiness that someone feels about themselves. Thats what all the influencers show in their beauty routines, its what all the Coke commercials advertise, it’s what bad motivational speakers promise to you. But I don’t think self-love actually means or looks like happiness at all. For me at least, it looks like contentment.
I have had a low opinion of myself, my image, and my life for a very long time. Perpetuated by loved ones and strangers, this feeling of self-doubt and hatred has been with me as long as I can remember. There isn’t a world out there where I would ever be happy with the body I see in the mirror. Being a member of one of the most hypercritical communities out there, the gay community, I have been taught through people’s actions to hate many aspects of my body. My hair is too dark, too thick, and there’s too much of it. I’m not tall enough. I’m not skinny enough. My teeth are too yellow and too far apart. My eyes aren’t a light enough brown to be warm and inviting but yet not dark enough to be mysterious. I think everyone has their own insecurities and you know what doesn’t help us get over them? Someone saying “Just take care of yourself, boo,” then peacing out of our lives forever. I tried my hand at many of these thought changes and none of them stuck because I wasn’t putting in the work. Loving yourself isn’t about coming to a pinnacle of thought where you no longer have insecurities, its about working with your insecurities, wrapping them in a warm hug, saying “I see you. We’ll talk about it later.” Loving yourself is saying “I may not be perfect, but I’m good enough.” Loving yourself isn’t about happiness, its about the work you put in to accepting yourself as you are. 
This requires patience, grace, and a hell of a lot of sighing in the mirror and saying “Well, this is where we’re at.”. Holding myself to the standard the world has set for me, or the standard that 20-something twinkies on Grindr have, is unrealistic and damaging. But guess what, I’m still going to compare myself to those standards anyway. And so will you. But you know what I’ve been able to do instead? I can now look at myself and say, “You know what? I’m not that, but I am something else.” And that can be just as validating. It should be just as validating. But if we played the games of woulds and shoulds we’d all be unhappy.
I used to draw myself in my journals as faceless blobs with hair everywhere because that’s how I felt the world must see me. I would make gross depictions of myself to reflect how I felt about myself. Now I see those depictions as someone who was unable to accept or appreciate the way they looked because they were unwilling to sever their image from outside expectations.
I’m still unhappy with the way I look. Who in the world likes how they look 100% of the time anyway? But now I can identify things that I can be content with (possibly even like!). I can be content with how hairy I am because I am unwilling to shave every day to accommodate the alternative. I can be content with my teeth being jacked up because I know that orthodontics are out of the question for the time being and I know that some people like my smile regardless. These are things that I have decided to let go of, they are beyond my control and so I have had to accept them as they are. Doesn’t mean I’m happy with them, but I am saying they are good enough, because there is no alternative.
Don’t be fooled, loving yourself is not all about the physical. While I will admit that is one of the biggest struggles for me, it may be something totally different for you. Maybe its your job and you feel insecurities in your position and how you might operate in the workplace. In this case you have to also find the limits you can work within and find your contentness there. Maybe your family is something that is a constant struggle. Relationships of any kind can have their pain points and a part of self-love is giving yourself the agency to make the right decisions for yourself within those relationships.
I feel like I’m rambling now for no purpose other than to fill a word count but what I really wanted to say in all this is that loving yourself doesn’t have to mean that you are 100% down with everything you got going on. You don’t have to be happy to have self-love and to practice self-care. Self-love can be as simple as saying that you are good enough. You have met the minimum requirements for being a human, congratulations. When you’re like me and you’ve spent a long time feeling like you don’t deserve to even be alive and taking up any physical space at all, being content, being stable, and being good enough, is some of the highest self worth you can hope to experience.
