When love isn’t an option
“I love you.”
Say it. Whisper it to yourself in the dark. In the mirror. In the quiet hours of the morning when there is only you and your heartbeat.
Say it over and over again until your breath is ragged from the repetition. Say it until your throat is dry. Say it until the words stop sounding right, say it until the words feel like home in your mouth.
It took me thirty years to like myself. I look back at the years of self-hatred and my delicate heart clenches, knowing that I wasted so many years of my life not seeing my worth, not letting joy into my heart.
I started a new writing project recently and found that as the words spilled out of me onto the page, that so many of them were about me and my relationship with my old self. The things splashed out on those pages showcased someone so deeply in pain, that self-love felt a million miles away. Someone who saw themselves as broken, as unworthy of love or happiness, and my heart ached for that girl, that girl who saw so little in herself.
I sat down intending to write about self love over romantic love, and I still will articulate that one day, but I want to say something so devastatingly real that it hurts.
It is impossible to love yourself if you hate yourself.
It is impossible to love your body if you hate your body.
It is impossible to be happy if you don’t feel worthy of the things that bring you joy.
Love can feel like such a leap from hatred. It feels impossible to flip the coin from love to hate if you have been marinating in hate for so long. So this month, a month known for celebrating love; romantic love, friendship love, self-love, I instead encourage you to aim for a step away from hate. I still want you to whisper the words above to yourself whenever you can, but don’t expect yourself to live those words immediately.
Perhaps the next step from hate is like, or perhaps it is neutrality, or perhaps it is just less-hate. It isn’t a perfect science, it isn’t the same from person to person, or body to body. It is hard work loving yourself. It often means quieting the voices in your head, the voices we hear in the tone of societal constructs telling us that we are not enough as we are. It often means shifting away from people you love, from comments that have become part of your vernacular, or simply reimagining what life could be like basking in love rather than swallowed in hate.
I started this post with “I love you” because I want you to know that those words are accessible to you, that they are real, that you deserve them. But I also want to hold space for the fact that those words aren’t easily spoken to ourselves, for so many reasons.
So this month I encourage you to love yourself, or like yourself, or tolerate yourself, or maybe just opt not to hate yourself or your body. You deserve that. We all do.
