Fall in Love with Your Own Life
There are mornings when I am reasonably fond of myself. The hair cooperates, the clothes fit the way I remember them fitting, I accomplish something before noon, and I move through the day with the reassuring impression that I may, in fact, have my act together. Then there are other mornings when I catch myself in an unforgiving mirror, remember something stupid I said in 2007, discover that I have forgotten an appointment and wonder whether the woman supposedly running this operation should perhaps be replaced by more qualified management. Apparently, I am expected to love both of these women.
That can be a tall order if we think self-love means maintaining a warm and admiring opinion of ourselves at all times. I don't know anyone who does that, and frankly, I'm not sure I would want to spend an extended weekend with someone who did. Human beings are irritating. We make mistakes, behave badly occasionally, procrastinate, misjudge people, gain weight, lose patience, forget passwords and sometimes walk into a room with absolutely no idea why we went there. Being the person with whom you spend every waking moment means you have unusually complete access to your own less impressive material. The mistake, I think, is believing that love requires admiration.
It doesn't work that way in our other important relationships. I can love someone and be annoyed with him. I can love someone while believing he made a terrible decision. I can love someone and tell him the truth, expect better from him, forgive him, laugh with him and occasionally wish he would go occupy another room for an hour. Love is sturdy enough to survive a disappointing Tuesday. Yet when it comes to ourselves, we often create a much more fragile arrangement: I will be on my side as long as I am behaving like someone I approve of. That isn't much of a relationship.
One of the central ideas in Utterly Smitten is that self-love isn't constant admiration. It is a relationship built through attention, honesty, respect, compassion, trust, protection, encouragement, enjoyment, repair and commitment. That definition appeals to me because it removes the requirement that I wake up every morning dazzled by Jennifer Maier. I don't have to stand in front of the mirror and announce that every inch is magnificent. I don't have to believe every decision I've made was wise or that every personality trait I possess is delightful. I simply have to stop making affection for myself conditional upon being pleased with myself.
We understand this instinctively when dealing with someone we love. If your best friend called and said she had embarrassed herself during a meeting, you probably wouldn't respond, “Well, this confirms what I've suspected for years. You are fundamentally incompetent.” If she gained twenty pounds, you wouldn't revoke her right to wear attractive clothes until she lost them. If she was exhausted, you wouldn't insist she produce something useful before she was entitled to rest. You might tell her an uncomfortable truth when she needed to hear it, but you would probably manage to do so without conducting a prosecution of her entire character. The book makes precisely this distinction: we often extend patience to people we love while turning a difficult moment in our own lives into evidence about who we are.
Oddly enough, I think the difficult days reveal more about self-love than the good ones. It isn't terribly challenging to be supportive of yourself when you're succeeding, looking good, being praised and generally behaving like the woman you hoped to become. The more revealing moment comes after the rejection, the mistake, the photograph you hate, the argument you handled badly or the failure you would prefer nobody know about. Utterly Smitten puts it this way: “Self-love is not how warmly you feel about yourself on your best days. It is how faithfully you treat yourself on your difficult ones.”
Faithfully is the word that matters to me. Faithfulness doesn't require pretending nothing went wrong. Sometimes loving yourself means admitting that you owe someone an apology. Sometimes it means recognizing that the way you're living is hurting you. Sometimes it means making the doctor's appointment, looking at the bank statement, ending something that needs to end or finally admitting that your current approach isn't working. Love isn't the voice saying, “Everything you do is wonderful.” It is the voice capable of saying, “This needs to change, and I'm not going to humiliate you while we change it.”
I especially like that distinction because I have never been terribly interested in the version of self-love that requires me to lie to myself. If I'm standing in front of the mirror thinking I look like hell, telling myself that I am the most breathtaking creature ever to walk the earth is unlikely to fool the one person who was present when I formed the original opinion. Some days neutrality is plenty. This is my body today. These are the circumstances today. This is where I am today. What would it look like to treat this person decently? The book describes body neutrality as a kind of cease-fire: you don't have to admire your body before you feed it, dress it, protect it and stop attacking it.
Maybe that's where self-love becomes much less sentimental and much more useful. It shows up in the ordinary decisions nobody applauds: wearing clothes that fit the body you have instead of punishing yourself with a closet full of clothes for the body you intend to have; saying you need rest before you collapse; allowing yourself to enjoy something that produces absolutely nothing; keeping a small promise you made to yourself; expressing a preference instead of automatically saying, “Whatever you want.” These aren't grand declarations of self-esteem. They are evidence that the person living your life has finally been included in its care.
And perhaps becoming utterly smitten with yourself isn't about reaching some glorious state in which you finally approve of everything you see. I think it's something more durable than that. It is knowing that when you are wonderful, you will enjoy her; when you are hurting, you will care for her; when you are wrong, you will correct her; when she changes, you will get acquainted with her again; and when she disappoints you, you will not use disappointment as an excuse to abandon her. After all, this is the longest relationship of your life. You might as well make it a good one.
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