self love is not a slogan

the real work of loving yourself when survival was all you knew

this is what integration looks like. the shadow and the light. not one defeating the other. both becoming whole. hilma af klint, the swan no. 1, 1915

did anybody ever tell you that learning to love yourself would require grieving every version of you that must now disappear?

i bet not…

instead you were most likely handed the affirmations and the morning mindfulness routines, told to put on your own oxygen mask, fill your own cup…

as if you hadn’t already been abandoning yourself for years just to survive.

the solution was never going to be that simple.

because we are born into this wild and cruel world so vulnerable and completely helpless, one hundred percent at the mercy of whoever is tasked with keeping us alive, and most humans are so wounded they can barely show up for themselves, let alone a child.

so more wounding occurs.

you know exactly what i’m talking about because you have experienced it as well.

we all have.

shit tons of baggage… from a shit ton of trauma.

it’s the generational trauma that has become such a buzzword lately.

rightly so. we are all wading up to our eyeballs in the shit passed down from our parents, their parents, and their parents before them.

and still, like you and i — since i assume you wouldn’t be reading my words unless we had some resonance with each other —

some of us try our very best and still we cause harm.

not because we, in any way, wish to cause harm.

but because we are still blinded by our own unhealed wounds, our own unhealed shadow.

and the shadow doesn’t disappear just because we don’t look at it.

so the healing journey is the long journey of integrating our shadow.

it is the long journey back home to ourselves.

and then there are others who have abandoned themselves long before they abandoned us, and they hurt us because, well, that’s exactly what hurt people do.

either way, a message forms. not just in the mind, but deep in the nervous system itself:

something must be terribly wrong with me to have been treated this way.

i am not enough. i am not worthy. i must be unlovable.

and the body responds accordingly.

hypervigilance becomes our resting state — (not that this is restful at all!)

while people-pleasing becomes the strategy.

we scan every room we walk into, contracting our inner wisdom, adjusting to become smaller, dimming our light, doing whatever it takes to not be rejected or harmed.

survival becomes self-abandonment.

and it gets hardwired in.

i had a dream recently where i was in line — it happened to be in my old high school cafeteria.

we were all lining up to have an iron rod inserted into our heads.

and everyone just… shuffled forward like it was normal.

but something in me saw it. and i stepped out of line just in time.

i woke up knowing exactly what my body was telling me.

this is what happens to all of us.

especially in those formative years, when we are just beginning to become ourselves — when something sovereign is trying to emerge — and instead we get handed the program. the false matrix is the term i resonate with.

find a job. find a spouse. be enough. need less. want differently.

keep moving. don’t look up.

they must keep the rats racing in our cages.

and most of us stay in that line for years, or dare i say, our whole lives, before we even realize we’re in it.

so when someone simply says, “just love yourself” and this includes me.

because if you’ve been following my work, you know i am a love junkie.

i won’t ever get tired of pouring love out into the world.

and i’m simultaneously learning, little by little, how to fill my own cup first.

even with all the b.s. being pumped straight at us from every source — here on substack, we have escaped to love each other, to be courageously honest, and to shine regardless of the dark oppressive clouds and the iron rods being inserted in our minds all around us.

the thing about self love i have come to learn, is that if you learned to survive by leaving yourself, self-love doesn’t feel natural.

it feels foreign.

sometimes it even feels dangerous.

underneath the toxic positivity culture and the heart-warming affirmations and the morning routines, there’s still a quiet question humming:

am i worthy of love?

and when that question lives in the body, we go looking outside ourselves to answer it.

we seek it in belonging, in romance, in recognition, in someone who will finally stand beside us and say you are enough.

there are entire spiritual spaces built on bypassing this wound.

people learn the language of awakening and speak beautifully about consciousness and healing.

but if they haven’t sat with their own wounded child, the lonely one, the scared one who just wanted to be loved, it eventually all comes crashing down.

you see it when people preach integrity but live in contradiction.

take deepak chopra for example… how many millions has he helped while secretly befriending a child sex trafficker, asking epstein to “bring your girls” on trips, and expressing relief when one of his accusers dropped her lawsuit?

the wound doesn’t disappear when it’s skipped and bypassed.

it always leaks out.

sometimes subtly.

sometimes super destructively.

when power replaces empathy and when importance replaces humanness. because the wound was never integrated.

i’ve lived my own versions of this too.

being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and even all of us who endured more subtle damaging programming —

all the seasons when we believed someone else could finally meet the ache in us.

and when they couldn’t, it hurt. it always does.

not just because of the lack of love and care, but because it touched the original wound.

but recently i’ve been learning, as have you, through countless trials and errors:

if someone cannot love themselves, they cannot truly love you.

the other day i posted a note:

you don’t see people’s true colors when you’re a yes.

it’s the no that brings out the truth.

and often that’s when you see it…

you were fuel for an ego. not love for a soul.

because self-love is not a slogan. it’s a confrontation. and when you learn to love yourself you must also confront all the hurt humans who you have allowed to hurt you because you didn’t believe you were good enough for better treatment.

and then, once you walk away and burn the bridges down, it’s sitting in the loneliness without reaching for distraction.

learning the difference between solitude and isolation, because solitude is chosen and sacred, and isolation is just survival dressed as independence.

the turning point is when you’re willing to feel the anxiety, feel the longing, hold the little child inside and say:

i am here. i am never leaving you again.

it burns to feel their tender pain from so many years of self abandonment.

but there is something on the other side of that fire.

i once did a firewalk on the summer solstice, hot coals raked into a glowing path, walking over them barefoot.

it sounds impossible, and yet when you are centered and fully present, your body can do extraordinary things.

self-love is like that.

not about becoming indestructible, more about becoming aligned.

when you stop abandoning yourself, you move through the world differently.

you stop chasing love and start recognizing it, because the love you were seeking outside was never separate from you.

the journey isn’t about becoming superior, it’s about becoming integrated.

and somewhere in that process you realize: you are not powerless, you are not broken.

another note i recently posted from my own growing pains and self discovery:

living in alignment means listening to your body.

every. step. of. the. way.

it’s a new way.

it’s the only way…

to be.

because you — beautifully radiant and flawed you —

you are the one you’ve been waiting for.

and from that place, not a fantasy, but one forged through actually sitting in the fire, you stop forming relationships out of survival and start choosing them consciously.

that is the real self-love journey. and it is anything but easy.

but i’m here for it. and i know you are too.

thanks for being here with me.

i love you for being you.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞