Who Benefits?

One of my best tools for self-love is this simple question: who benefits?

I get political with my self-love. I think about everyone who benefits from my self-hatred – all the CEO’s getting rich off our collective insecurities, the systems of oppression fueled and bolstered by the lies we internalize, abusive people who manipulate our self-doubt for their own ends.

This is the way I see it: if I’m not enjoying and spending and reveling in and claiming my own aliveness, someone else is using that life-force energy for their own agenda.

And remembering this gets me back on track real quick.

Think about it: when you’re busy calling yourself a failure, criticizing your body, or telling yourself you’re not enough – where is that energy going? Not into your deep passions or desires, not into your creativity, not into your voice (which the world definitely needs, by the way).

And no shame or blame around this - it makes sense that lots of us struggle with self-love, body image, and positive self-regard. We live in toxic systems that tell us lies about ourselves and the world and do all sorts of things to turn us against ourselves and each other.

But self-love is our work. And I believe that work is one of the most important journeys we walk in this lifetime.

I don’t believe any of us are here to objectify, judge, or criticize ourselves. I believe we’re here to step into our bodies and into the current of our aliveness. We’re here to claim and enjoy and spend our life-force. We’re here to choose ourselves.

I know we’re all on this journey together, and I send all my love, support, and encouragement to my fellow travelers, along with my own commitment to never give up on this self-love quest. I hope all of you join me on that journey. 

Freedom and Adulthood

As a young, not-yet-adult person, I often heard some version of this refrain from the grown-ups in my life: “you better enjoy these years of freedom now before the bills, responsibilities, and stresses take over your life – because being an adult is *super* hard.”

And they weren’t wrong about this.

As it stands, I have to go to work to make money to purchase the basics and essentials of my survival (as most of us do in capitalism). I have to fix things, do tasks, file taxes, make calls, and solve problems (not the fun kind). There are also the difficult feelings, scary circumstances, and collective sufferings to deal with at the same time.

But adult life is not the grim reality I imagined.

Because what I didn’t understand then is that I would be in possession of a vast and glorious freedom – along with the raw materials (time, energy, possibility) to shape this life how I wanted, even with some less-than-ideal pieces in the mix.

Circumstantially, life is probably harder now than it was then. But here is the key difference: as a teen and young adult, there was a cacophony of voices crowding my spirit that did not belong to me. I believed what they told me and did not yet have the wisdom and perspective to see they were not helpful and not my own.

Growing up (still in process) has meant doing the work of finding my own voice and real self and making that my center.

This is why life has gotten better the deeper I traverse into adulthood: Because understanding this point has made me infinitely more free.

I have the freedom and self-possession to choose – to exercise my agency around how I think, what I believe, where I point the compass of my life, what I say yes or no to, and how I spend my discretionary time, energy, attention, and money. And this is so, so good.

I understand life now as a journey of deepening into the truth that my life and self belong entirely to me. And to me, that is freedom.