I am learning to love myself. The good, the bad, and the ugly … that’s what I am supposed to love. I am pretty good at loving the bad and ugly. I do self deprecation at mastery levels. In fact, it’s even shown up on my work evaluations – more than once. I have had a lifetime of pointing out my flaws to others, all in an effort to beat them to the punch. I suppose I thought that if I could say: “Hey, but about this second stomach…” Then I could be in control of the thought that this girl is not perfect. In general, my approach is met with laughter as the “comic” is the my most comfortable persona.
However, I have been on a several year journey to stop the unhealthy patterns in my life and eliminate the junk that isn’t serving me well. And currently I am reading a book that is telling me that if I learn to love myself, (and I mean REALLY love myself) that I will be able to live life fully and truly experience life. I am not sure if this makes me want to barf or do an excitement cartwheel. I think a little bit of both. And I feel confident that a cartwheel of any kind would likely end in a barfing sequence, so I guess that works itself out!
So, if we think about that statement “I need to love myself”, what does it even mean? It means that instead of beating anyone to the punch with my self deprecation, I need to learn to love the parts of me that I need to control. (Here comes that barf…) That’s hard to do. For more than 40 years, I have had my go-to methods and I am not sure how easy it’ll be to change these very established behaviors. But, I am going to try. I am going to try to learn to love myself through imperfections, lots of junk, a really tired mind and body, and all the other things that I carry around each day. And I am going to use this blog to write about it.
THE ENDANGERED MAMA BEHR 