It is the willingness to see loving yourself not as a matter of infatuation, but as caretaking, that will change your life. Seeing self-love not as eros, but something deeper than what’s on the surface, will tip the scales eternally in your favor. Because it is that love — the unconditional, practical, grounded kind — that does not just last, but roots, and makes you stronger than you were before. It is that kind of love that does not always give you what you want, but rather, supplies what you need. It tells the truth. It does not cater to your self-defeat, but reimagines your becoming, your way forward. It serves the sake of your future self, the person you most hope to be.
This is the kind of love that can think long-term. The kind of love that knows what you need on the simplest and most fundamental level. Giving this to yourself requires the grace to endure the temporary discomfort in favor of the greater peace you foster by taking upon yourself your own real self-care.
So rather than attempting to see yourself the way you’d want to imagine someone you are romantically in love with — as perfect, and beyond your own humanness — try to see yourself the way someone who actually loves you does. To take into consideration your goodness, and allow it to not erase the unseemly parts, but make them also worth loving, and holding, and seeing to the other side.
This is your evergreen reminder that the greatest act of self-love is to no longer accept a life you do not like.
And to remember that the pathway to that change — though inspired at the onset, is often more tedious, more unknown, and more challenging than most care to consider. However, there is nothing kinder you can do for yourself, or for your life, than to start organizing your feelings into what feels good and what does good, as opposed to just what feels good, or not. The very things that often bring us the greatest peace and wellness and stability long-term are uncomfortable at the start.
We can only find what we are meant for, when we stop running from what we are not.
