Self-Love
Every day I feel grateful for the decision to love myself.
I didn’t know when I began this journey how it would pay off ten, twenty, a hundred thousandfold. I didn’t know how much grief would come, or how much gratitude. I just took one little step at a time and then one day I looked up and I had traveled miles.
The loss was great. One partnership, five. One friendship, twenty. This career, that career. This home, that home. There was a moment when I lost everything and had nothing. But I was OK.
Because I had faith, because I trusted in my guidance and connection to the universe because I prayed devoutly because I had already been shown that things would work out.
They did.
But then I lost some more.
I have 6 years of daily journals that I have carried with me through everything. 10 moves, homelessness and squatting and living out of my truck, a life-altering move to new york city—some of them are dirty, coffee-stained, crumpled with rainwater. They chronicle a life. My 2nd life. My (I really wish the Chr*stians hadn’t made this phrase so dirty) Born Again Life.
I like to go back and read them to see how far I’ve come.
Andy Warhol has this quote
“And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory.”
My journals hold my life’s atmosphere. They show the imprints of my steps on this lifetime. When I read them I feel such love and appreciation for the me who was drunk and crying over one too many romantic rejections, the me raging over the ruination of my burlesque career at the hands of petty gossips, the me stuck on someone who wouldn’t love me back, the two steps forward ten steps back that became the process of me walking away from my most difficult relationships. The little bits of doodles and notes and prayers and frustrations, the struggles with self-love and sobriety, the tarot readings and tracking the astrology. It’s all there, in my own writing.
It’s hard to argue with your own writing.
To read my own words with such candor and intimacy is pretty cringe at times, and I do find myself frustrated with how long it took me to learn certain lessons but there’s even a lesson in that.
These pages are where my self-love journey began. Journaling has been so important for me in the long process of finding my voice. I have struggled with selective mutism most of my life, and often find solace in my own silence (especially in moments of high stress or trauma), but that seeped over into areas where my inability to speak my truth hurt me. I am a fawner and a freezer by nature, so when met with conflict, I would often completely shut down and set about smoothing things over and keeping the peace.
My journal was my safe space. My place to get out how I was feeling. My place to join my experience with my emotions. It paid off big time. It helped inform my choices. It helped me stay grounded in the face of conflict. It helped me gain self-awareness over how I was wounded in childhood and how that drove how I responded to life. I gained an abiding sense of empowerment. I learned how to be free.
I’ve put many of the tools that have helped me heal (including daily journal prompts) into a Self-Love Course for anyone who is struggling with where to start or with the discipline in how to prioritize this kind of self-care in their busy lives. This course comes with guided meditations, self-care rituals, body-positive mirror work, letter-writing exercises, and lots more.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here. Thank you for doing the work.
Happy Healing!
Sign Up Here!
#selflove #selflovecoach #selfloveblog #selflovepodcast #howtoloveyourself #howtohealyourself #selfhealers #mentalhealth #mentalhealthblog #journaling #journalwriting #trauma #codependency #attachmentwounds #cptsd #selfconfidence #forgiveness #walkingaway #selfloveblog #howtobeconfident #conflict #boundaries #healthyboundaries #walkon #selectivemutism #throatchakrahealing #fight #flight #freeze #fawn #love #radicalselfacceptance #healing #selflovejourney
