You have to love that day when you realize how completed f*cked up you are and how much damage you have done.

No matter how much therapy you have completed and how much self-love you have practiced daily, you still feel the pain, the anxiety, and the abandonment issues.

That sh*t is for real.

I am a coach, a leader, a believer, and someone who teaches that self-love is the key to happiness. I teach that the only love that matters is the love we have for ourselves.

I wholeheartedly believe in this concept—except for the days I don’t.

I dread the days when I wake up and realize how little I feel or maybe how I feel too much.

I dread the mornings when I haven’t even fully opened my eyes yet, but the anxiety is wide awake inside me—the racing thoughts, the cruel words I say to myself, and how I tell myself that no one loves me.

The truth is, even after all the work I have done, I still don’t love me—depending on the day, of course, because this isn’t every day.

Some days, I am madly in love with myself and life feels magical—I recognize how talented, capable, and beautiful I really am—until I don’t feel that way anymore.

Anything can trigger me, really. It can be the smallest of things when, boom, the self-loathing and the fear that everyone is abandoning me wash over me. I can almost taste everyone’s dislike of me, and boy does that feel real.

Yup, that’s what I deal with, thanks to chronic complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), abandonment issues, a myriad of other things stemming from my childhood, and choosing men who loved to capitalize on the latter.

That being said, I am not one who likes to drone on and on about my unhappy childhood or the bad men I, myself, chose. I am a solution-minded person, and I am also grateful for the experience, no matter how crazy it sounds because I am able to learn so much and teach the same.

Maybe this is what makes me such an excellent coach—I have lived it; I still live it; and I can relate to my clients.

How else can someone teach how to cope with this if they themselves have never experienced it? They can’t. They can read about it, but it doesn’t give us the experience we need to truly teach it.

Don’t get me wrong, there are days I wish I thought like a normal person—not have anxiety, CPTSD, and a family I don’t despise. But since I wasn’t handed that deck of cards, I needed to play the cards I have been dealt with.

I am not even sure what “normal” is, or if it would have even suited me.

Maybe my little bit of crazy is what makes me “me” and obviously, I like myself—well, at least, today I do.

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