Loving Yourself is Not Enough

It seems like everywhere you look there’s someone touting the importance of self-love. Whether it’s in the arena of self-help, or positivity, or body acceptance, or dating advice, eventually you wind up back at the idea that you have to love yourself. Which is great, I don’t necessarily disagree with that. Although there is something to be said for having people in your life who love you even when you can’t love yourself. But that’s another topic altogether. My problem with the Love Thyself movement, is that there’s this unspoken understanding that as long as you love yourself all of your problems will magically go away.

If I love myself, I will be confident and find the partner of my dreams. If I love my body as it is, all of the soft/hard/wrinkly/disabled/complex parts of it, I will be happy and confident. If I love myself, there is nothing that can stand in the way of my dreams. Which sounds great, but isn't true. And I say this as someone who has devoted a lot of time to working on herself and accepting the things about my body and my life that are out of my control, and working to improve and better the things that are in my control. I have worked hard and learned to choose love of what I have versus love of what I thought I wanted. And yes, it has made me happier.

When you remove yourself from a state of perpetually wanting more, or looking to see if there is something better out there, you will feel happier. It just makes sense. Gratitude for what you have is far more powerful than yearning for what you don’t have. But shifting that focus has not been the be-all, end-all promised by the Love Thyself movement. Because I can love myself, love my body, love my life/friends/house/dog/etc, and still have trouble believing in myself. I no longer beat myself up for having those doubts, but they remain nevertheless.

And that is my problem with the Love Thyself movement, it only encompasses half of the work. Learning to love yourself is internal, and from my experience largely passive. It’s a restructuring of paradigms in your head, a rewiring of your internal monologue, a rethinking of what actually makes you happy versus what media has told you you need in order to be happy. It’s important work, but it is passive work.

Learning to believe in yourself is active work. The only way to strengthen your belief in yourself is to do things, especially things you would normally shy away from. If you’re a horrible cook, you, of course, can and should love yourself. But if you want to improve your cooking all of the self-love in the world won’t help. You have to believe that you can improve, and believe that when you make mistakes you will learn from them instead of being broken by them. Then take that belief and start making food, learning from your mistakes, and improving.

That is what I have been struggling with lately – believing in myself, not cooking. I’m a great cook. So I have been actively working to shove the doubt down, and just do the things that give me pause. They don’t have to be done wonderfully, or even correctly on the first try. But they do have to be done. And the beautiful thing about having already done the self-love work, is that now when I do one of those things, the little voice in the back of my head says, “See, I knew you could do it.” And that is a truly lovely thing.