Love yourself! But like, how?
And a story about my college love life
Last call for this weekend’s workshop! Just a few spots left.
If you're going through a big change, on the edge of a big change, or feeling stuck in a transitional, liminal space and worried your life will feel like this forever:
Holly Whitaker and I are offering our first-ever Zoom workshop this Sunday, June 16th, at 5pm PST / 7pm CST / 8pm EST (replay will be sent if you can’t make it live). Two hours, 79 dollars.
It’s called THE END and it's about endings: why they’re so hard, different ways to conceive of them, how to navigate them in an expansive way that honors where you've been and where you're headed, and how to mark them with ritual. This is the first in a series of workshops designed to help you live into the deep, shitty middle of transitions.
All the info & registration is here. We’d love to have you!
Dear everyone,
Growing up, I was never one of those girls who got Valentine’s flowers or cards from secret admirers or a doting boyfriend. Despite my best attempts to secure the kinds of steady romantic relationships my friends seemed to effortlessly fall into, my love life in high school and college was light on actual connection, and heavy on drunken hookups at parties and ignoring each other the next day.
I eventually began to believe this dynamic was all I could hope for. This felt (duh!!!) painful and confusing, but I figured at least I was in some version of the game, which felt better than being on the sidelines.
Every February, Valentine’s Day would roll around and I’d still be single, maybe sleeping with some dude who liked me enough to have sex with me but not enough to tell his roommates about it, and I’d resent the shit out of the holiday. This was a very understandable reaction to an occasion that served as an annual reminder that I wasn’t worthy of celebrating it.
My junior year of college, I decided to stop being bitter about Valentine’s Day and instead, reclaim it as a celebration of friendship. I didn’t have someone to buy me a dumb rose from a gas station, but I had a ton of friends, and what kind of bullshit passive-aggressive holiday requires you to be picked by somebody else in order to participate in it?
So instead of hiding in the literal closet that functioned as my bedroom that year, listening to Ani DiFranco and smoking Parliaments and feeling sorry for myself, I carved a linoleum block that said FRIENDS ARE GOOD LOVE and made cards for all my people.1
Making Valentines for your friends doesn’t exactly sound like a radical act, but this is the first time I can remember consciously choosing to divest from culture in order to create my own meaning from something, and in making that choice, liberating myself from some of my inner suffering.
In reinventing Valentine’s Day to make it work for me, my 19-year-old self took my power back from both the grip of a painful thought (“I’m not good enough”) and the narrow, arbitrary cultural norm that had inspired it.
You can turn your lemons into lemonade— or you can turn them into rocks to throw at the glass cage of our (sick) society.
In the second half of the 2010s, the “self-care” movement on social media gave way to the imperative to “love yourself.” It was a big ask, given that the machine of modern Western culture teaches us to be perpetually dissatisfied with ourselves in order for the economy to sell us face creams and butt implants and home organization tools that promise to fix our terminal shortcomings.
Back in 2017, being told to LOVE MYSELF, in quippy Instagram sound bites and slogans, felt a little bit like being told to levitate. “Okay, love myself. But like… how?”
But I was determined to learn to levitate.
And as it turns out:
Deciding to make Valentine’s Day mean whatever you want is how to love yourself.
Getting curious about what makes you feel good, like not numbed-out, Hulu-marathon-good, but more deeply alive-good, and then relentlessly prioritizing the shit out of those things is also how.
Choosing yourself instead of waiting to be chosen: this is how.
(Waiting to be chosen is like circling the block looking for a spot on the street when you’ve got your own driveway. Park the car. Take your energy back.)
Acting on a deep knowing or intuitive hit inside yourself, even when it’s illogical or the people in your life don’t get it: this is how.
Asking yourself what you need, trusting the answer, and following through. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. This is how.
Saying no to something or someone in order to protect your peace or because your intuition tells you to or for no reason at all except you want to. Talking to yourself the way you talk to your best friend. Learning to be okay with being the villain in someone else’s story. Taking little tiny baby steps toward the kind of life you want, even when it feels out of reach. Finding a way to move your body because you like it, not because you want it to be different. Not making yourself wrong for wanting what you want. Valuing your periods of lying fallow, doing nothing of note, just existing in your meat suit as the planet spins, because this is also part of your humanity.
All of this is how to love yourself. There are lots of other ways, but these are some of mine.
At first, loving yourself will be harder than it sounds because it requires questioning almost every piece of cultural and social conditioning you’ve ever received, including the idea that if you’re not consistently putting others’ needs before your own, you’re selfish, which is the worst thing you can be.
At first, loving yourself will be harder than it sounds because the things that make us feel most alive are likely also things that defy logic, which is often another word for cultural expectations and norms, which means our sweet fearful minds trip out with reasons and excuses why we can’t defy them.
And at first, loving yourself will be harder than it sounds because not everybody in your life will be on board. Some of them will prefer the version of you they understood better— or the one who wanted the same things they wanted. As you shift and change and let go of old ideas about who you need to be, your relationships will shift and change, too. And that’s okay.
Knowing that loving yourself, at first, will be harder than it sounds, but working on it anyway:
This, too, is how.
ICYMI:
BAD SLEEPERS! My last post was about my sleep routine, and there’s an amazing comment thread at the bottom of it, with readers sharing all their tips, tricks, and remedies. I know a lot, and I’ve been learning so much from you all in the comments! I’m not joking, it might be worth your $5 to upgrade just to be able to read them.
Foreshadowing?
There is so much gold in this post Emily. I'm not really one to talk about frequencies and downloads, but you really are operating on a higher vibration. Not only that, but you've got a ladder and an instruction manual so we can rise too.
I love how you get real about how hard it is to love ourselves in a way that goes beyond spa treatment self care (not that I don't appreciate a massage every once in a while - ie chapter 24 of my memoir that dropped today 🤣).
I've read that the number one regret that people have at the end of life is not being true to themselves and living a more authentic life. In my case, my husband's death was the catalyst for the changes I made in my life, but we shouldn't have to lose so much to put our own needs and desires first.
As you wrote, baby steps add up to real change. The big surprise on the other side of doing the scary thing is that most people are too busy worrying about their own lives to take much notice of what we are doing.
I love you, I think you are awesome and I aspire to be vibing up there in the clouds with you some day.
PS I sent flowers to myself each Valentine's Day after my husband died. This year I included a note that says YOU ARE LOVED. It's in my junk drawer in the kitchen so I see it every time I need the scissors - which is surprisingly quite often.
Bahhhh, emily this is just what I needed to read today. Beyond the stress Ive shared in our class, I’m also newly on a sobriety journey and my emotions are EVERYWHERE. And I question myself every second of the day. Thank you for your words and your heart.