There are few things that I can say with certainty about the changes that my life has undergone in the past year. It's difficult to know whether I've changed for the better or the worse, whether my current personality is a result of accepting who I have always been or as a result of being shaped by my experiences- most likely, it is neither entirely fake nor real, but rather a result of slowly changing my actions and methods to better reflect who I think I am, an image which can not be confirmed as more or less valid than who I appear to be. There's a lot of things that I could write about relating to that- for example, my confusion with the intense introversion and social anxiety that I face but act constantly against, the way that I genuinely believe that I am more easily scared and more prone to want to quit than others, and yet I am hailed as brave because it is my tendency to always confront. That, however, is a subject for an entirely different post.
Though I am not entirely sure where I am on the descent into personhood, I am fairly confident that I am recovering, as far as mental health issues go. This is a difficult topic, because I'm so good at ignoring indicators of my real mental state- having breakdowns and then forgetting or suppressing them, claiming that I am doing really well and then waking up one morning and realizing that I have been stuck for a long time- so I really don't know the extent to which I was depressed, or to which my condition has improved. But while self love isn't neccessarily the exact opposite of depression, if I use it as measurement of my recovery, I'm certainly making progress.
For a long time, I rejected the concept of self-love as absurd. In all honesty, though I am an incredibly loving and caring person, I tend to view love and affection as a game of sorts, very real in how expressing it makes me feel but quite empty in motivation. I love showering others with love, but I am fully conscious that it is my choice. Of course, I feel love within me, but there is also a degree to which I am aware of every layer of myself including the part of me that has chosen to feel this love. Love, to me, if anything, has always been an exchange, a neccessary action to give meaning to your life, but not a force outside of your own control. I say this rather nonchalently, but again, I often find myself governed by my emotions- it's just that I also know that some part of me has yielded this control, and that love is an emotion created of me, not something that enters into me. So self love, to me, has always felt unneccessary, and too transparent for me to feel it as anything but fake. I can act the part of loving myself, but it won't give me the reward of convincing myself I love myself.
But slowly I've been realizing that self-love may be something quite different; something more along the lines of acceptance than affection. And, slowly, I've realized that self love, particularly the notion of "radical self love," for me, revolves around excepting myself because of, not despite, my individual characteristics. A good example of this is with my gradual acceptance of my body. I used to groan whenever I read others always equate bodily self-esteem with self love as a whole, because that wasn't what I thought my journey (or whatever) was about. Self love, as a method of recovery, is about realizing your ability to be okay, to keep going. But for me, this often manifested itself as, "Alright, I've encountered (Problem A). But I am smart, resilient, and brave, and I will confront it and be okay, despite the fact that I was in the wrong to begin with, will cause more problems, and will never cure (cause that resulted in Problem A)," which is actually progress on my earlier thought process, "Alright, I've caused (Problem B). I can't deal with it in any way beneficial to myself, because that won't cure the fact that I caused it. I need to work on not being (cause that resulted in Problem B) or I should die/avoid (Problem B) because it is my fault and accepting the fact that it happened would be avoiding confrontation of the fact that I'm a bad person." Often times, the cause would be something like the fact that I am loud and voice my own opinions, or that I was obnoxious, or, in romantic situations, issues regarding my weight, appearance and hygiene (the latter of which is probably fine, but which I've had insecurity regarding for a long long time, because I've always felt anxious that there are always elements of routine personhood that I may have never learned or realized, and that I'm not succeeding at the fundamentals of being alive). I used to ignore my feelings about my physical grossness, because I thought they were incurable, and that I should learn to love myself despite them. But a few days ago, I had a very obvious and yet somehow life-changing revelation- why worry? My body is mine, and it exists for me. I am under no obligation to show or tell of any part of it that I don't want to. I am under no obligation to have any part of it align with ideal that I am told to strive to- not just as far as beauty but as far as simple things like not worrying about my back acne because who decided acne was hideous? As far as not comparing the crookedness of my teeth to that of others because there is nothing whatsoever tragic of my teeth being set (very slightly) differently to those we consider ideal. There is no reason, I've realized, to strive to be societally excepted as beautiful. When forcing gender roles down my throat, my mom loves to tell me how nice it feels to be pretty. But it shouldn't, because prettiness is arbitrary. It should feel nice to look however one looks, and though it may feel nice to have others acknowledge that they too think one is attractive, we should not be internalizing societal constructs of beauty to a degree that we, ourselves, alone, impose them upon ourselves.
My path to accepting aspects of my personality has been to some degree similar- the most freeing realization for me is that I don't have to define or label aspects of myself. I don't love/accept myself despite the fact that I am ugly, I love myself the way I look. Similarly, I don't love or accept my ambiverted self, or my science prowess, or any other describable characteristic. I just love whoever I may be. It is not acceptance of individual facts, it is acceptance of my freedom from definition by these facts. It is acceptance that I may act and make mistakes and fix them in whatever way, no matter if it aligns with my stated personality. It is a similar story for me with my gender presentation. I am often feminine, and occasionally masculine or androgynous. There is no need, however, for me to label my gender and then dress and act accordingly- that is exactly what I oppose about the binary gender structure. There is just the fact that I have accepted that who I am or how I present has absolutely no relation to gender, and that that's not confusion or denial, but just who I am.
Much love,
Lemon
