The Nagging Sense of Self Love

A conversation in my head while journaling a couple of days ago. Bold is what I wrote. Italics are what went on in my mind.

I would like to -

Really? What’s stopping you?

I will make some time -

Oh, so now you’re the master of time and space? Where is this magnificent machine with which you’ll create the most valuable and irreplaceable resource in the universe?

I will find some time -

Come on. It’s not like it fell out of your pocket between the couch cushions.

I will prioritize some time to sketch -

Better. When? What time will you pull out your sketchbook?

(sigh) I will do some sketching from three to four p.m.

“Some”, huh? This gonna be like the morning when you sketchnoted your goals for the year and decided the little cartoon hearts and letters counted? Is that really going to get you to the point where you can draw the kinds of dancing human beauty that you want to?

I will work on sketching the muscle structures of the back for an hour today starting at 3pm.

Yeah? Cool. That sounds like a good idea. What else you gonna do?

I bring this up as kind of a defense for the times when I’ve had similar conversations with my coaching clients (and, prior to getting some better self-control, with friends, loved ones, and occasionally complete strangers). I do this with myself as well. This is part of the whole idea of awareness that I brought up earlier in the week: calling yourself out on the ways that your own thinking and language may be keeping you from getting the life you want.

It’s annoying. It took me nearly a minute to write that final sentence. But you know what? It was a whole lot easier to change I’d like to do more sketching into actual lines made with my own hand when I had it in a concrete way.

Yeah, I was nagging myself. If someone did that to me in everyday life, it would be annoying as heck, right?

Unless…it was helping me achieve my dreams. Unless it was making it possible for the life I want and the life I have to become indistinguishable from each other.

Someone who does that — well, that person must love me a whole lot, to go to that much trouble.

Got any love you can show yourself today?