(Note: My work is best when enjoyed auditorily, so I highly recommend you listen to my narration of this piece. Feel free to read it if you would prefer.)
In my life coaching practice, I talk with my clients specifically about self-acceptance and self-esteem. Except I don’t love these words; I only use them because they get both of us in the right neighborhood. But once we’re in that neighborhood, I always suggest we ditch these terms.
They’re not freaky enough.
The word “acceptance” sounds like we’re merely tolerating ourselves.
Here are a few things I accept: I accept that my Amazon packages are indeed lost, I will never get them back, and that I’m now out $40. I accept that she doesn’t want to be my friend because I casually dropped the line “I’m lonely” mid-convo to a complete stranger, and now, she’s just weirded out. I accept that I queefed, publicly, ON THE BEAT, in the middle of a Pilates class because my instructor kept making us do these hip thrusty wall exercises.
I don’t want to accept myself like I accept queefs.
I can do better!
Similarly, the word “esteem” makes me think of Jane Austen characters whose very futures hinge on dusty, cinched-in words like decorum and propriety. Now I love a good Jane Austen character like any good, middle-class white woman raised in Evangelical purity culture, but that kind of sexually-repressed politeness isn’t exactly the energy we’re going for here.
I want radical self-love.
Down and dirty.
The kind of energy that, when your toddler dumps the whole container of parmesan cheese onto the kitchen floor and then starts eating it, you plop down beside him and eat it too. When in Rome!
Basically, I want this kind of self-LOVE where I am both the woman and the icing.
I want to be a wild woman about my radical self-love…so extreme that it might border on gross. I ache for her—that version of me that can jump into a bathing suit and not worry about my jiggling or swinging when I tell a story with gusto. I see her all the way over at Point B while I’m here at Point A screaming—“I’m comin’ for ya! Don’t do anything interesting in our life until I figure this out! Also, your upper thigh fat is beautiful!”
But how do we get to Point B?
I don’t know that we ever do. Maybe it’s less of a destination and more about the choices we keep making. Like choosing to wear the overalls that make me look like a big toe because I LOVE them (what is “flattering” anyway—oh wait, I know patriarchy). Or like continuing to choose a lover even though you hear them blowing up the toilet on the daily. If “love is a choice,” it would seem that radical self-love is no different.
But I keep expecting radical self-love to finally dawn on me one day, and that its transforming power will change me forever. And I will never have to choose it again. But I don’t think it works that way. I think it grows the more we choose it. It grows when the world tells us we’re a horrible queefing loser, and yet, that woman, ME, I choose not only to accept being her but to R E V E L in being her.
When the world drops her on the ground, I want to be so into her that I would lick her up off the dirty floor so as to not waste
one
tiny
morsel.
On a very side note that is oh-so beside the point, I have found my Amazon packages. Faith in humanity: RESTORED.