The thing about being insecure and unhappy, is that’s not a conditional reality. If you’re insecure and unhappy, you’re going to be insecure and unhappy in a shack, the same as you would be in a mansion.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that, if you are an insecure and unhappy person, the key to changing that has nothing at all to do with your income, your partner, your appearance, or even your health. It’s as simple as the long and arduous process of learning how to love yourself as the miraculous, unique, flawed, amazing person you are, have been, and always will be. You can start seeing results in as few as ten years!
Other people promise that their self-help book, seminar, or dumb new meditation technique will relieve you of your earthly suffering and usher in a reigning peace to last from roughly day you start until the end of your blissed out earth-mama existence. But when you chose self-love, the rewards are virtually undetectable.
Will you be happy all the time? Hell no. Will you still experience the daily hardships of regular life? You bet your poorly prepared and altogether too flawed ass you will!
When you choose to drop the materialistic shame-spiral and focus on being a good steward of your body, mind, and spirit, absolutely nothing else changes anywhere on the planet. Money will not come to you, sexual partners will not fall at your feet. Your parents will still die, your boss will still fire you, and your car will still throw a rod in the middle of Gorman in the summer.
The one thing I can tell you is that when you realize that jobs, kids, cars, purses, even cats are just drag, that whichever way you slice it, you can not buy or even make yourself a more worthwhile person than you are right now, you open up the possibility that, from time to time, you might at least realize that you are not required to qualify for humanity.
My problem is not, nor has it ever been, my tendency to be negative. My problem is not my poor impulse control, the joy I take in being judgmental, or the circumference of my ass. These are merely symptoms of my general lack of self-care, which is itself a symptom of my general lack of self-worth.
The good thing about knowing that the real solution is unconditional self-love is that it’s much more difficult to get sucked into the idea that external things will save me. The numbers on a scale, a check, or a price tag have nothing to do with what I’m worth. Nor does my ability to do or not do a thing. Even being is inconsequential.
There will be days when you are called a spic on the street, when your favorite ballot initiative fails by a wide margin, when your mother is high and sends you hateful text messages. You will be disgusted by your own body, rejected by your lover, and all your project proposals will be refused. This doesn’t make the concept of self-love, self-care, and self-esteem any less valid.
Because I am a spic, and my government is in the toilet, because my mother is mean, because I am and can be gross, because there’s nothing that will ever make everybody behave the way I want them to. And if I am defined by all those things, I would be devastated. I probably am anyway. But if I am defined by the illusive and indescribable spark that gives my life, my self, value when nothing else does, then I am fine, aren’t I? I have a billion-lumen bulb in my ass that takes precedence over the rest of that shit, both literal and figurative.
The simple fact is that I am as valid a human as any other human on this planet, and that revolutionary, radical concept can contribute to my unwillingness to fold in the face of the unending onslaught of terror, hardship, and suffering that is the human condition.
And you can too.