Self-Love Journey

There is something beautiful about jumping in puddles and singing in the rain to Christmas carols all while trying not to spill my toasty Pumpkin Spice latte, and in the right doses I absolutely love it. However, this Holiday season I found myself once again in Africa, and that means no Pumpkin Spice lattes warm in my hand. Instead, it means Rainy Season.

How to explain Zambia’s Rainy Season to Americans…It’s something like April showers bringing May flowers, but replace the showers with skies flooding down to bring brown roads into rushing rivers of life. And replace the fields of flowers with bush that spreads across the horizon blanketing the wet earth with glorious green as far as your eye can see. All this happens through the constant ebb and flow of raging deluges and calm continuous stretches of gray.

One day will hold the promise of sun and if you’re a newb like me, you will foolishly leave your umbrella by the door, only to pay the consequence of a drenched outfit and sopping hair on the walk back home. The next day will be clouded in an endless shadow of gray, sprinkled with raindrops at the top of each hour. When these days fill my calendar, I begin to recall that childhood song and repeat it ceaselessly like a prayer floating up to heaven, Rain rain, Go away, Come again another day.

This type of weather is the ideal setting for a day curled up in bed with hot cocoa, marshmallows, movies and bottomless bowls of popcorn. The thunder is a soundtrack that both thrills and excites, and the lightning flashes across the sky’s stage theatrically demanding to be awed and feared by those below. The whole scene is a wonderful escape, until the days become weeks and the weeks begin to weigh on my heart. Eventually all the gray skies and afternoons spent curled in bed reading book after book force me to start asking questions of myself that sometimes I don’t like the answers to. This year’s Rainy Season question that I find myself forced to ask is What is self-love? And do I actually need it?

My knee-jerk reaction to self-love is that my country and particularly my generation has way too much of it and certainly doesn’t need more. Yet, we also have some of the highest rates of suicide, depression and pain-killer addictions as a result of numbing the emptiness where love should be found. On a more personal level, I think that if I wrote a list of all the things I call myself on a weekly basis, I certainly wouldn’t characterize it as loving. So, at the zenith of the Selfie and Treat Yo Self lifestyle, the self-love we proudly display on the screen does not seem to be feeding our souls with the love we so desperately desire. I find myself, like many others, paradoxically putting myself first, but not actually loving myself well.

At first, I’m hesitant to side with those who say we must learn to love ourselves before we can love others for reasons I mentioned in the Treat Yo Self Culture post from before http://www.badveganlady.com/2017/01/09/treat-yo-self-culture/. However, I am beginning to see the necessity of rethinking just what self-love and having compassion for myself means, and it’s paramount importance as a building block to loving others well.

How can you speak kindly towards others when you have a daily habit of speaking cruelly towards yourself? How can you offer words of encouragement to others when the words you offer to yourself are riddled with criticism and disdain? Living one way outwardly and an entirely opposite way inwardly is incongruent with living truthfully and compassionately.

The stories we tell ourselves daily hold power and will influence the way we relate to others. If we are constantly harsh towards ourselves, this will eventually come out in a harsh attitude towards the world and those we share it with. Yet on the other hand, if we daily offer ourselves love and acceptance in spite of our many flaws, we build a practice of offering it to others as well.

As does frequently happen with me, I get the logic to this approach, but living into it is where I still seem to be stuck with two feet in this Rainy Season’s thick mud. I think that speaking kindly to myself would be beneficial, but each time I make a mistake, insults and criticism flood my mind. I try to accept myself, but as I look at a picture of myself, I begin to callously conclude that a new workout routine is way passed due and that if I weren’t so lazy maybe I could have Michelle Obama arms instead of these shapeless ones I see in the photo.

I often feel guilty about even considering to increase self-love in my life, but these storm clouds are forcing me to deal with the uncomfortable truth that if I want to grow in unconditional compassion, I’m going to need to include myself as one of the recipients. For the next few months I am going to explore what growing in self-love will look like with a series of blog posts. I encourage you to join and share with me how it is going for you as well. I am sure we won’t arrive at perfection, but that’s not the goal after all. In fact, it is quite opposite the goal. With that in mind, let the self-love of 2017 begin!