Love Yourself
Let me start by just naming that this will be the most uncomfortable and vulnerable post that I have written to date.
I am enough. I love learning. I am compassionate. I am imperfectly myself. I have made dumb choices, but accept they were dumb. I understand who I am. I realize that I don’t know everything (with the exception of Philly sports). I fail. I have talent. I have no fear of leaping in hopes to fly. I love you.
A couple of weeks ago, my foggy mind drove Andrea and myself to New Jersey to see Andy Grammer with a couple of friends. Grammer’s music has become somewhat of a safe haven for me over the last year. His positive messages always bringing energy and a smile to my world.
And this concert came at the perfect time, but I am jumping ahead, so let me start again…
You are confident. Your positivity radiates through every room that you enter. Your kindness knows no bounds. You love hard. In some ways, it feels like your role is to empower other people; to give them all of you, filling their cups at every turn. You were put here to inspire others.
These, among many other things, are what friends, family members, and colleagues have said to me…about me…for years. These were my characteristics, the parts of me that excelled in the eyes of others. And I had largely believed it, trying to live up to that hype. But there is a secret that they didn’t know…
I can also be really good at faking it.
The truth is that there have been many moments in my life that I have used my positivity to hide something darker. There are times that I use the smile as a facade. My failures haunt me. I say incredibly awful things to myself when I don’t get it right. There are dark dances and negative narratives floating with aimless aggression through my head.
And all of that is ok. I am imperfect. I get into ruts like everyone else. I just hide it better. The attacks toward myself have always been my way of dealing with the interruption of feeling joy. Whether it is my own actions or those of someone else, it has been easiest to blame me.
Hold up though. It is important to point out that I am not always living in that space. The heavy majority of my life is spent in a world of sunshine and rainbows. My life view is obnoxiously positive. I have a friend who will often mouth off in conversation, “Oh. I forgot that you live in a cloud of positivity.” Happily ever after is my endgame. I have been labeled an “Eternal Optimist” a time or two. But do you want to know the downfall of having endless hope?
When your happiness is impeded, it hits you like train out of nowhere. It lifts you into the air, slams you back to the ground, and refuses to wait for you to catch your breath before it happens again. When the realization is finally over, you are left there to decide how to respond. And for me? I go into a spiral of self-attack. And I stay there, whipping around its twisted walls, effortlessly hoping to fall out by some accident.
And I was in that place on my drive to Jersey: A cloud of self-doubt, unwarranted anger. I had fenced myself in around the question of whether or not I was happy with who I was. Try climbing over that barricade. It’s the Everest of fences, my friends.
Back to Andy…
This show was everything I needed. The “Love is the New Money Tour” shirts hanging, the energy palpable, and standing by the entry to the theater was a board with Andy Grammer dollar bills all over it (seen in the background of the title photo for this post). Andy had asked fans to write positive messages to one another, so at every city stop, people could read them. Perfect.
About halfway through the show, he transitioned from one song to the next by sharing this same vulnerability. He explained that his positivity is, at times, a mask. I listened intently as his words seemed to find their way directly to my heart. And then the lyrics to a song I had listened to more times than I can count began (Love Myself). The interesting part? I had never really fully engaged with the lyrics before that night.
“I love you, I don't say it enough
I love who you are, who you’ve become
Don't know why I cannot hear it
'Less it comes from someone else
But I'ma find a way to finally feel it
When I say it to myself.”
Loving ourselves is hard. I don’t mean self-care in the sense of going to the gym, eating better, or seeing the screen time number on Sunday mornings has dropped from the previous week. I am talking about loving yourself to the point of, upon waking up, feeling truly grateful for all you have in this life. It is to love yourself unconditionally, despite the minor quirks, flaws, crappy choices, or whatever else stands in the way of loving who you are.
This all starts with the choices we are faced with each day. The thing about our opportunity to breathe on this Earth is that we are unable to choose all of our life’s circumstances. It’s the fairest of tradeoffs. There are plenty that are decided for us. The rubber meets the road when we make our choices in how we respond to these circumstances.
If something is not right with our lives, avoiding it, hiding from it, placing blame on ourselves or someone else will only hurt us in the end. What we need to do is recognize the piece that is missing and make the change. There are situations in which that recognition hurts. We have been cut open, burned, hurt in some way. I am here to remind you that the wound is where the light comes in. Use it. See it. Turn the wound into the light of your North Star, leading you toward the change that needs to be made. Do this knowing every decision that we make can take us closer to or further from it. When we know what matters, we find our something.
When we find our something, our purpose, we maximize the good in our lives. When we find people to enhance that, those little interruptions of joy become far less difficult to counter. It turns out that making the right choices leads to more of…you guessed it…right choices. And the more we push the positive up and the negative down, loving ourselves becomes just a bit easier.
The last nuance to self-love is a reminder that it is always going to be a process. We won’t ever be perfect. The heavy moments of self-doubt will once again rear their ugly heads. The “what if” questions will continue to riddle my brain pretty much on the daily. I have just become more focused on ignoring them. I am deeply flawed in so many ways, but that’s what humanizes me, and it makes me no less deserving of love. And the same goes for you.
We are all a work in progress, and realizing that, while being willing to do the work…is loving ourselves.
My challenge is simple. No matter where you are in the process of self-love, your own words of affirmation will be the ones that matter most. Be confident in what you can accomplish, what you look like, and what you bring to this world. Most of all, don’t depend on someone like me to tell you. The more you say it to yourself, the easier those moments of doubt disappear. So, repeat after me…
I am enough. I love you.
Much Love,
Mike
