On Self-Love and “I’m Focusing On Me Right Now”

I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear. I will not tell you what you want to hear, especially if it’s a variant of dishonesty.

I’ve gone on tirades before, recently, beginning painfully recently, to defend my authenticity at all costs, as my aggressive feminism blossoms. In truth, this isn’t a love story or even of friendship, but resilient self-awareness. On falling in love with my entire self, desperately evading judgmental clichés. On the uphill battle, on the life-long endeavor, on roving depths unknown, on shedding light on imagined spaces unseen.

And it’s hard, don’t get me wrong, to distract myself from the periodic lack of human magnetism, to rest in true contentment of solitude. But I won’t allow encroaching vulnerability in my already addled and whirring mind to deter me from this ongoing reconciliation with self-awareness. I could begin to list to ways in which I confront my many, many, insecurities, but out of sheer selfishness, I keep those locked in.

Though, the walls of my corporal fortress have secret points of entry, Achilles heels, Trojan horses, and the like. As I attempt to veil my inherent emotional transparency, the more these avenues inward crop up. In shielding my insecurities from others, they loudly beg to be seen, heard, and loved.

This courtship of my insecurities, longwinded, and, in moments, incredibly tedious, is what I imagine inner-monologues of belligerent male, chauvinusm to resemble.

I expect the same results as patriarchal domination — I am entitled to self-acceptance. I am entitled to personifying my self-worth, wholeheartedly, whole-bodily, now. There is a tireless urgency to peak and exude ostensible confidence. When it doesn’t manifest…I’m annoyed and disillusioned.

Put out, already, fuck. I’m tired of having this conversation with you.

How much longer will I have to listen to this, until I can reap the benefits? Until my carefully cultivated invincibility surmounts my self-deprecation?

A seemingly innocuous journey towards enlightened self-awareness is, strangely, not as easy as falling, and is paired with the same pit of anxiety balled and ingrained within.

My imagination and intellect flex at my core, and can even momentarily overpower my weakening neuroticism. It needed cooing and attention to be appeased, but not silenced.

I’m not a poet, I don’t think or speak in dainty prose, nor am I particularly preoccupied with impermanence. Yet, I can’t completely evaporate my emotions or diminish their intensity. The only, albeit fortunate, manner I know to channel their manifestations is through analytical writing, or reading feminist social theory — I often find even fiction overwhelms me when I’m spiraling. I hide behind big words that keep me insulated so that my intellect bites, not fatally, but enough to know you’d be damn foolish in trying me again.

In doing this, I protect my honesty. I like to call it profound honesty, however I fear my pretension shows. I’m still working out who I am, and to dilute this extremely susceptible process of garnering self-awareness with pretense, is, to say the least, illogical. I’m searching for emotional evolution and identification here. To let my logic diagnose the feeling, step in and say, “cut, it, the, fuck, out, before someone gets hurt.” I do it to protect the love of my life, myself, see?

So, when I say I am not willing to manipulate my honesty, it stems from this process of falling for myself. I’m wholly wedded to narrowing the disconnect between who I want to be and who I am presently, between what I know and what I do, between ideology and praxis. It’s not enough to silence the insecurities, or mask them with complimentary and shallow rhetoric.

Rather, to love and to live this love requires unadulterated nurturing. I wish I could find the romanticism in all this, but it mirrors self-preservation. Which, if done thoughtfully, is what love is, right? Logic and love aren’t mutually exclusive, right? Let’s expel the harmful notion that passion, all-consuming love isn’t real or powerful without heartbreak, toxicity and consequent unrelenting numbness.

Love as enhancement, as enrichment, as vigilance, as growth.

Perhaps this process will replicate at a later date.

On falling in love.