Self-Love Is The Answer To Feeling Well Everyday
Why Outward Accomplishments Lack Long-Term “Feel Good”
You know those 2 or 3 big things you want for yourself? The things that will allow you to have self-love, or let yourself be loved after you accomplish them? If you just could “get your shit together more,” or work a little harder, or catch just one lucky break?
Don’t bother.
I’ve done the 2 or 3 big things my friend. It doesn’t work. The juice isn’t there. The big check comes, someone commissions a huge mural, a fan gets a tattoo of your art on their arm… the high only lasts a few days, maybe a few weeks, if you’re lucky. Then you’re back to the WANTING. The CRAVING. The not-enoughness. It’s a merry go round, and it’s never satisfied. It feeds on more outward accomplishments, it NEEDS them to feel good. To feel like you’re enough.
I just want to feel good inside more days than not. To wake up everyday feeling peaceful, content, or just even-keeled. Hell, I’ll settle for even-keeled days. Don’t you just want to feel good inside? Wouldn’t waking up everyday and feeling peaceful, content, or even-keeled be nice?
Self-Love is what I’m really after.
It is the state I can get to last, the one I can thrive in, live in, feel well in. The big banner accomplishments are fine, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I’ve abandoned my goals; in fact, part of the formula for sustainable wellness is having healthy goals to work on, to work towards — goals we can be creative with. The secret is in the balance. Feeling the self-love you’ve felt on your best days is accessible more often than you may think.
If you’re WAITING to feel good UNTIL you FINISH the goal, you’re forcing yourself into a lot of unnecessary, uncomfortable, and unfruitful suffering. Trust me on this one. I’ve lost count of the weeks, months, years spent waiting to feel good. As it turns out, it’s a choice. The power is in your hands.
Living with mental illness and its copious roster of symptoms is hard enough. The lingering days of depression that drag on, feeling like something drained your fuel tank AND put a hole in the bottom. Trying to refill it feels impossible. I loathe the low days; at least I can funnel the anxious and hypomanic days into productive energy towards loving myself with exercise and other healthy outlets. Low days are the real test for me — how do I love myself? This dopey, sleepy, unmotivated mess…?
It’s these times in particular that require grace and compassion for the human condition. I am here, I am enough. You are here, you are enough. Maybe today the best you can muster consists of making your bed and brushing your teeth. That’s fine, everyday is not going to be like this one. Revel in rest and recuperation — remember: rest IS productive. Restocking your inventory, resourcing yourself for the future, is self-love.
You are okay.
Just by being here. Showing up everyday and doing your best, even if it isn’t much in your eyes… chipping away at the marble block is enough. Masterpiece be damned — I have found it is in the chipping at the block, the daily effort, where freedom is found. We are deceived by the outside world and it’s finished products. Imagine how grounding it would be if we knew how much time it took the creators of the plethora of masterpieces we see everyday to actually complete their works.
And even if you are slower to complete whatever endeavors you may be undertaking, take a moment to ask yourself this: do we see these post-masterpiece makers rejoicing in the streets day in and day out? Not so often. Their goals were personal and unique, as are yours. I have seen some celebrations in private, some lavish parties, and some mellow rejoicing. I have been on the receiving end of awards, big paydays, and big wins. The final result is always the same: the party ends, the buzz fades, and I wake up a week or a month later with an empty space.
Or… I can practice self-love throughout…
…and avoid the empty spaces. I can shift my mission away from accomplishments of tangible, financial, and earthly natures. I can adopt the path of self-nurturing. Taking care of the “inner me” first, everyday, nourishing my internal garden of peace, tranquility, harmony, and the like.
These are feelings that the earth and its finite nature cannot so easily diminish or take away from me. I understand self-love is a weighty subject with nuance. But it really is the biggest goal we can accomplish. Everything else… can be categorized as fun. It’s icing on the cake. Of course the world has been driven forward by humans with grand ambitions — thank goodness for the ego — but these are fleeting accomplishments in the scheme of things.
The Hubbel Space Telescope is regularly showing us how infinitely vast our universe is. The accomplishments of man are finite, but the love of the universe is everlasting. We can tap into that love by fostering love for and within ourselves, because after all, we are expressions of this infinite universe. This power is relentlessly peaceful, contented, and saturated with bliss. No drugs necessary. To paraphrase Alan Watts:
“You’re it. You are something the whole universe is doing.”
It is you — when you are still, or focused on something creative, or connecting deeply with nature. It is the recognition of itself in you, it is the silent observer of all your thoughts and emotions. The presence in-between your ears behind that thinking voice, at the center of your heart and mind. The witness to your entire human experience, dreams, nightmares, and liminal states. It never sleeps, ever watchful over you, and it’s always loved you. It’s always loved me; I have proof now — I have learned to feel this presence on a daily basis.
This eternal presence in-between your ears and behind every heartbeat — this energetic consciousness that vibrates and animates your cells — it will only be satisfied by one thing: self-love, and it’s counterparts.
You don’t need a reason to feel love. You don’t have to earn it. Self-love is your choice. It’s always available. I believe our mission on this planet is to be, feel, and share love. I can attest to this mission being a peaceful and fruitful one.
I’d like to leave you with a quote I heard 15 or so years ago that has stuck with me. I’ve never been able to trace who said it to give them credit, but it goes like this:
“There is nothing to figure out, just a life that needs to be lived.”