There’s a prompt up at Wild Precious Studio in which I invite my lovelies to build a page around their feelings about self-love.
As I added the video and wrote the blurb for the studio, the prompt whispered to me; softly at first, and then a little louder - Effy? You MUST play with me. You MUST!
Out came the glitter and paint and gel medium and off I went. Here’s the video:
The thing about self love is that even thinking about it can set us up for hard times. We try to be self-loving, and then find ourselves thinking things like – I’ll feel really good about myself IF I behave in a certain way or WHEN I achieve a certain goal. This might not even be conscious; it might be a message that some critical part of ourselves whispers at us from the vault of our subconscious mind.
I have this voice, and it has a history of saying mean things to me when I contemplate self-love, or when I think about self-care and being kind to myself.
“Well, aren’t you full of yourself?” It sneers. “Who do you think you are? A saint? A GODDESS?”
Blah blah blah.
I know this voice is self-protective and that it exists for a reason. I love that my internal cast of characters includes such protective parts. But! They haven’t yet learned how to work with me, you know? They still gang up on me in their attempts to keep me safe.
The public eye, they tell me, isn’t safe. Tooting my own horn isn’t safe. Telling the world I love myself isn’t safe. Because, they say, it puts me out there. It makes me a target for wounded people who can’t stand the thought of anyone thinking highly of themselves. And yes, it’s true. The wounded people sometimes arrive on cue, and sometimes they say mean things that get my dragon scales all up in a fiery mess of defensive.
It’s all right, though. It really is. The more you put yourself out there as a self-loving person, the braver you become. Your strength increases and you find yourself feeling more compassion for the wounded than ever before. You know the mean stuff isn’t personal, you stop taking it that way, and you give yourself hugs and glitter-filled art journal pages and ice cream cones regardless of what so and so says about it.
I love myself best when I consider that I am mostly four years old just doing my best to live in a complicated and scary world. I love myself best when I make an accounting of my failures with compassion instead of derision. I love myself best when I embrace myself as always in process, impossibly flawed, never close to perfect, and blissed out on life anyway.
I love myself best when I remember my humanity.